Vinegar to Jam
by SekritOMG
Summary: In the brutally hot summer of 1976, Stanley forgoes honest work for a more attractive pursuit: introducing an American missionary to outcast London. A prequel to "The Rectum is a Tomb."


GUYS HI, I'm posting this here on the off chance that there is some interest in fics set in the RIAT series, because that fic was first published on this site! But I'm no longer in the habit of using FFN, so if you're interested in seeing this fic in its full, properly formatted glory, I'm posting all of my writing to AO3 these days, under the handle SekritOMG, same as always. (Okay I also set up an account to post fic in another fandom - details below if you're curious.)

Anyway, I hope, if you stumble onto this fic, that you enjoy it - but please also know that this is probably the last thing I'll ever put on this site, aside from the final chapter of RIAT when it's finished.

But, forget about that for now. I worked hard on this fic for several years and it's only as good as it is because of serious beta help from my friends **Tomato** and **Nhaingen**. I'm extremely grateful for their patience.

* * *

 **Vinegar to Jam.**

 **I.**

At 10:15 in the morning, it was too early for visitors or telephone calls, unless it was an emergency. Having come in at just 6, Stanley hoped it was an emergency. Here was someone in his bed, an older man with a head of thick brown hair that crept down his neck and spread across his shoulders like overgrowth in the garden. Whatever Stanley had been on last night, he certainly hadn't noticed that, and he was surprised to find that, rather than a turn-off, this man's unfortunate body hair was merely a sign that the times were changing. In the 1960s, no one would have been caught dead with hair growing on his shoulders. Though he was tired, Stanley knew this was the start of a long morning of wistful reminiscence, a fever dream about the innocent time 10 years ago when he found himself sleeping not with men but with boys in the very loosest sense of the term, fey creatures in pastels with skinny brows and painted nails.

Stanley had only just begun to indulge in this thinking when there came a second knock. His trick from last night wasn't stirring, so he buttoned up his pajama top hastily as he flew down the stairs. The concrete was painfully cold as his feet slapped against it, worried all of a sudden that this could be Kyle, though when Stanley had last seen Kyle he was growing quite affectionate with a certain Mark—perhaps a Marcus?—behind the painted concrete wall between the bar and the toilets, which might have been what caused Stanley to rustle up a trick in the first place. Or it might have been whatever he was on—what had he been on? Kyle had handed him something before they'd left his flat, saying, "Take this" and practically shoving it up Stanley's nose—well, all right, so long as he had no choice in the matter. The insides of his nostrils burned, and there was still a stiffness in his joints that hinted at a very long night.

Stanley pulled open the door to find two boys—two men?—no, they were boyish in their black pants and crisp white shirts, both sporting the wet look. The fossilized hair and starchy edges to their collars was a thing one only saw on the middle-aged these days, but the disjunction just served to make these young men look like kids.

Before Stanley could say anything: "Hello, my name is Elder Christensen!"

His companion spoke up: "And I'm Elder Harrison."

Stanley wiped his eyes. These "elders" were no older than he was. "Can I help you?" As soon as the question was out of his mouth, he realized they were proselytizing him.

They were friendly, too friendly. Stanley offered them tea and they hesitated to accept before outright declining. This was a particular sort of first time—Stanley had never dealt with missionaries before.

"Well, where do you come from?" he asked, to deflect their religious questions.

"Utah," said Elder Harrison. "It's in the States."

"I know where Utah is," Stanley said, though he could not have found it on an unlabeled map. He felt a defensive urge, a need to explain. He'd pored over maps of the US at Oxford, wanting to trace Kyle's journeys on Christmas holidays. His family had driven up and down the east coast from New York to Florida—but it hadn't escaped Stanley's attention that on the other side of the country there were vast, sweeping expanses of "states" closer in size to whole swaths of Europe than any of England's piddling little counties. One of them was Utah. Stanley knew of its spade-shaped bottom and squared-off top, or was that another—Colorado? Nevada? California was long on the coast; world over, everyone knew California.

"Have you ever been to California?" Stanley asked. He wanted to be polite. They were cute.

"Never," said Elder Harrison, and he looked away.

"Utah is the holy land," said the other one. "It's the modern Zion. There's no need to go any further west."

"Come again?"

"Have you ever heard the story of Joseph Smith?"

"I think my father has an associate by the name," said Stanley.

"That's so interesting," said Elder Christensen. "Really? Wow."

"Or maybe it was—Jonathan Smith? He's a geologist, my father."

"That's so interesting."

"But, no, I don't know any stories about a Joseph Smith." Stanley tented his fingers. "Were you going to tell me?"

It wasn't a good story, exactly—Stanley had authored only two books and yet he had editorial clarity on this topic. Too many characters, in and out of the narrative. A lot of go-nowhere bits and pieces of the plot—why would an angel tell Joseph to dig up sacred texts? Why Joseph and not another? There was no character development, no point to it. Joseph wasn't quite a protagonist; he had no flaws and the story's conflict dissipated without a real challenge. It sounded like the Bible stories Stanley had heard so many times as a child. "Excuse me," he interrupted, "but when is all of this taking place?"

Stanley expected to hear something generic: "many years ago," "ancient times," something that skirted real knowledge.

Instead, Elder Harrison perked up. He'd been sitting, grimly, with his arms crossed, concern on his features. Now he said, "In the eighteen-thirties".

"That's barely a century and a half ago!"

"He's an American prophet," explained Elder Christensen. "America was still young then. From an American point of view, 1820 is the dawn of our history."

"Bullshit," said Stanley, and both missionaries reacted.

Elder Christensen covered his ears and said, "Excuse me?"

Elder Harrison smiled, uncrossed his arms, and looked away.

"There's this book," said Elder Christensen, and he took it out of his bag and handed it to Stanley. "It's called the Book of Mormon. It's an instruction manual for how to obtain eternal life."

"More so than any other religion?"

"God is still speaking," said Elder Harrison. He looked at Stan now, his cheeks pink. "Why would God stop speaking to mankind? Our story isn't over. God continues to speak to this day. The Book of Mormon isn't a revision, it's a continuation. If religious texts are instruction manuals, this one's ... more complete. I guess you could say." There was a sorrow in his words, a shade of self-doubt. Stanley could hear it, thought he knew it. It was that silent shadow of resistance, the struggle, the sense of knowing but not understanding, or understanding too well and wishing one didn't. This Elder Harrison, he had it, and he was looking Stanley right in the eye until Stanley tilted his head in a knowing, sympathetic gesture. Elder Harrison broke the gaze and turned to look out the windows.

"Were you raised in the Anglican Church?" asked Elder Christensen, breaking the silence. "It's such an interesting religion. We went to a service—it was so beautiful. Really beautiful."

"I was raised Catholic."

"Oh my gosh, that's so interesting! Elder Harrison, isn't that interesting?"

"Oh?" He looked back to his partner. He was avoiding having to look at Stanley. "It's fascinating, yeah. You bet."

"What's that like?" asked Elder Christensen.

"Well, it's fine, I suppose." Stanley shrugged. "I'm not practicing. I would call myself an atheist."

"That's so interesting! I've never met one before."

"Well, here I am."

Elder Harrison sighed. His blush had dissipated and now he seemed, if anything, annoyed. "You're not going to convert, are you?"

"To what?"

"Mormonism," said Elder Harrison.

"Absolutely not," said Stanley. "But you should feel free to tell me all about it. I'm a good listener."

"Forgive Elder Harrison his bluntness," said Elder Christensen. "We haven't been at this for very long!" He smiled, but it was dead-eyed. Stanley couldn't get a read on anything in there.

Elder Harrison looked away.

"You can give me your little talk," said Stanley, "it's quite all right. I don't have much to offer you, though, because I'm not much of a homemaker. Tea?" Both of his guests shook their heads. "It's a little early but I could break out the sherry. Or whatever you fancy, I've got some—" Stanley had to think about it. "Half a bottle of brandy. I've just come into some whisky. Some jenever, which is a trip—"

"Oh, no thank you," said Elder Christensen.

"Isn't there anything I can get you?" Stanley pressed.

"We're fine."

Elder Harrison cleared his throat. He was a butter-yellow blond with watery blue eyes, plain features. Some of the point of their clothing, Stanley gathered, must have been to create uniformity and obscure their figures. Stanley wondered about their bodies; all he could make out was that Elder Christensen was paunchy and Elder Harrison probably not.

Elder Harrison spoke up: "I'll take a water, please, if it's no trouble."

"Absolutely," said Stanley, and he got up to fill a glass. He hadn't any clean glasses, and he hoped it was okay to just rinse one out. Would a jar do? No, it ought to be a proper glass. This was something Kyle would have found horrifying and offensive, but Kyle wasn't there. He had disappeared into a blur of sloppy making out and this had probably led, not too long after, to going somewhere with Mark, probably home. Maybe a hotel. Kyle was having his floors redone before he moved in, and would not have enjoyed exposing a potential boyfriend to that. Wendy had said, recently, "He ought to stop doing it that way if he really wants these men to stick around," and while Stanley saw what she meant and to some extent agreed, he also felt she did not truly understand, she would never, et cetera.

"Fine," she'd said, "you're right, I don't know what I'm talking about." Which was disappointing, because Stanley liked to talk about Kyle with her and was hoping the conversation would have continued.

Fittingly enough, just as he was handing it to Elder Harrison—who thanked him politely and took a deep quaff of it—Stanley's trick from the night before wandered down the stairs. He was still, problematically, naked.

"Jiminy Christmas," said Elder Christensen.

"Er," said Stanley's trick. "Who're these chaps?"

"Some missionaries who've dropped by," said Stanley.

"I think I'll go back up and, um—get dressed." He turned and fled back upstairs, his soft prick bouncing on his hairy thigh as he did. Stanley watched his arse jiggle as he escaped. There was something really exciting about that. He hoped the missionaries had seen it, too.

Elder Christensen said, "We really need to be going."

He hated the idea that they'd go. Stanley looked to Elder Harrison, whose eyes had grown wide. He put his empty glass down on the floor by his own feet. "Are you a homosexual?" he asked.

"What gave it away? Was it the naked man coming downstairs from my bedroom?"

"A homosexual atheist," said Elder Harrison.

Stanley had to grin at that. "I should print up calling cards."

"We are going," said Elder Christensen, betraying his own fear without dropping the cheer in his tone. "So lovely to have met you. We'll just—leave this." He left the Book of Mormon on the seat of his chair.

"No need," said Stanley. He picked it up and took it to Elder Harrison, placing it in his hands. Part of him wanted to keep it, but he wanted—he wished for a second look inside those bowed eyes. "Thank you for trying on me, though. Most people have given up."

"Okay." Elder Harrison was holding the book, staring back. "Thank you for the water. This was interesting."

"Be well," said Elder Christensen, through clenched teeth. He left, and Elder Harrison followed. Stanley shut the door behind them and looked around. He stumbled to where Elder Harrison had been sitting and picked up the empty glass. He carried it upstairs with him, where his trick from last night was fastening his belt.

"What in the bloody hell was that?" he asked Stanley.

"Oh," said Stanley, airily, "just some missionaries came by. I'd never had one, have you?"

"I hope they didn't get a good look at my face. That wasn't very responsible of you, you know. Do you want everyone in town knowing about—this?" He twirled his finger around, as if to indicate just, oh, Stanley's entire life.

"Actually, yeah, let people know," said Stanley. It wasn't entirely true; he did not want, say, skinheads to know, or any kind of ruffs he happened by. But in general, sure, yes, why shouldn't they?

"That you should open the door for such a thing is absolutely the starkest breach of propriety." He was now fastening his trainers.

"Oh, come off it," said Stanley. "They're just boys."

"I cannot believe it. The nerve!"

"They're free to get the word out however they like."

"Oh, not them, you! Opening the door, good god! You said you'd been to Oxford."

"I'm an Oxford _baccalaureate_ ," Stanley clarified.

"Then I suppose en route to obtaining that qualification you weren't tested on your ability to use common sense."

"As a matter of fact, I wasn't, no."

"Thanks for the rogering, then," said the trick, and he barreled past Stanley and down the stairs.

"The door's heavy." Stanley trailed after. "Let me get it for you."

"Thanks," said the man, "but no need." He hurried away, not without a struggle, and the door closed behind him; in an instant, there was no trace of him left in the flat.

The funny thing was, though, that Stanley was still holding the glass. He fell into the chair vacated recently by Elder Harrison, and brought the glass up to his mouth to finish off the water. He bent over to hug his thighs and, in the stream of glorious daylight that hit precisely where he was sitting, he began to plan out the rest of his day.

* * *

But Stanley's days were easily planned. He'd no job, and with two novels behind him, no plans to write another. Drafting them had been grueling, and he did not enjoy the results. Each was gay pornography cloaked in the camouflage of erudition and ornament. Yet below the surface there was little with which Stanley could identify, despite the two books being cross-sections of his experience, fanciful and revisionist views into the past decade of his life. He'd spent his early adulthood out of uni sharing a flat and attending therapy, heading to Sidmouth Street each weekday as if it were his office. It left him feeling—he still wasn't sure what. Most days, not much. Eventually his father had tired of paying for it. They'd had a real blow-up about it when Stanley had returned to Oxford to visit his family on the occasion of his twenty-third birthday.

"If you aren't even going to try," his father had shouted, "I am not going to allow you to throw any more money away on your continued subversion of the natural order of things!"

"It isn't a matter of trying or not trying!" Stanley had screamed back at him. "It doesn't work! It doesn't work! You try it and you see if it works on you!"

"I don't need to be fixed!"

"Perhaps I don't need that either!" It was a daring thing to suggest, and Stanley did not fully believe it.

In the end, Stanley's mother had mediated: "You promised to give him an allowance if he tried."

"He didn't try," his father insisted. "He's played us for idiots." But even as Randy Marsh was many things—miserly, impatient, sometimes just downright mean—he was, to Stanley's fortune, a man of his word.

The money Stanley received from his father wasn't much, but it was enough on which to survive, and there was a bit to spare for indulgences. After that, like most of the people he knew, his money went to going out and the various substances consumed once out.

He also liked to buy books. It was a bad habit; he wished he had more money to spend on reading instead of falling back on alternate methods of acquisition. Stanley's friend Butters was in the process of opening a bookshop, having recently finished his master's in English literature. Along with their other friends they had in fact read English literature together at Oxford, but that youthful passion had given way, for most of their colleagues, to more adult concerns.

And so Butters had offered him a job selling books at this new little store, and Stanley determined that today he would go investigate it. Butters had a latent religious fervor that no one else Stanley knew could relate to, and so going down there would serve the dual purpose of letting Butters down gently about the job, and giving Stanley's story about the missionaries an audience.

* * *

Among Stanley's friends, two were married. One was the elegant Wendy, who was female and therefore had the privilege of a legal union with a handsome nobleman with whom Stanley would occasionally have sex. There was also Butters, who was "married" to Bradley, a nervous, stuttering man who thought Butters was the most wonderful person on the face of the entire planet. Stanley did not fully understand that, though he supposed there might be something reassuring in the stability of the whole thing. He'd bought his flat, after all, with the advance from his first book, and he did have to admit he far preferred waking up there to chancing it with last night's entertainment. On the other hand, if Wendy and Butters were two entirely different friends on nearly alternate sides of the spectrum, Stanley found it very curious that they both made a pretty poor case for the benefits of marriage.

In that sense, Stanley found Butters and Bradley arguing in the basement shop, but each of them was relatively passive-aggressive and their fight was going accordingly:

"Brad, you know I adore you and I think you're full of brilliant ideas, but if you put a bench in the shop window people will come in off the street and linger there and go without buying anything, because of course the shop will look so cozy and hospitable thanks to your stellar design sense and then we'll never sell any books, and, well, you'll feel awfully bad that you hadn't listened to me, when I warned you."

"Leo,"—Butters' Christian name was Leopold—"it is absolutely essential that people be able to sit and linger in this shop, because your ability to source very rare and very pricey material will mean that customers require a place to sit and consider their purchases."

"But perhaps they needn't consider it, darling, perhaps we ought to get them out the door as quickly as possible, rare and pricey purchases in hand."

"A bench in the window will lure people in."

"A bench toward the back would give _paying_ customers a chance to rest but a bench in the window will tell everyone walking by they're free to take advantage of us, and a table of books in the window is well closer to the point! Stanley, hi." Butters waved Stanley inside and got up off the floor, where he had been sitting in cigarette pants, a lavender peasant blouse that fell off the shoulders with floral embroidery, and a little pair of strappy sandals.

"You know you can upholster this and it'll look a treat." Bradley patted the worn seat of the bench in question.

"Don't butter me up." Butters pulled Stanley inside with both hands and kissed his cheek. "So, this is where you'll be working!" he said, lifting a hand to the ceiling. "Ta-da!"

"Miss B, it looks wonderful," said Stanley. "But I don't think I want a job right now."

Butters' face fell. "Well—why not?"

"I don't—I have a lot to do."

"Oh, do you?"

Bradley sniffed at that, clapping Stanley on the back. "He'll talk you into it, don't worry." Without making eye contact, he disappeared into the back.

"Don't mind him," said Butters. "But, he's not wrong, you should let me talk you into it."

Crossing his arms, Stanley sat down on the bench. It was not very comfortable and he did not think it would inspire lingering, for all the discussion of whether to sidestep it, or how to do so. "I greatly appreciate your offer of employment, and I am pleased to see the place coming along. But, I don't know that work is really for me."

"Work is not _for_ you?"

"Well," said Stanley, "I am a writer."

"I know that!"

"So I really couldn't take any job where I would be kept from writing."

"That's so flimsy," said Butters. "So, so flimsy."

"Miss B—"

"Oh, don't bother. Let go upstairs. Have you eaten?" Stanley usually hadn't. "I'll feed you. Brad?"

Bradley's head popped up from the counter he was kneeling behind. "Leo?"

"We're going upstairs for a bit," Butters explained, as if his comments of just a moment ago hadn't been in earshot. "This boy needs to be fed."

In the comfort of their own space, Butters moved to the counter and leaned over it. Bradley kissed his nose, then tapped it. "Let me put a bench in the window."

"You!" Butters whacked at him, playful. "Exhausting! Okay. Stanley. Come with me."

At that time, Butters and Bradley lived above their shop. Some distant day, the shop would relocate, but even many years later, after serial unpleasantness, Butters would not be removed from his flat, the one he'd bought with Bradley. It was cheery, but narrow, and at that point relatively unestablished. There was some mismatched furniture. Nothing looked comfortable, though it was positively clean. Stanley, who did not own a broom or so much as a bottle of washing-up liquid, found it heavenly. He fell onto an uncomfortable kitchen chair as Butters nosed around in the breadbox.

"You're getting a toastie. I hope you like Dairylea, because it's all I've got."

"I'm sure it's fine," Stanley said, though he did not really care for it.

The kitchen was in a state of only partly having been moved into.

Stanley now felt that main business was concluded; he'd seen the shop and turned down the job offer, and while Stanley and Butters had known each other many years thence—more than ten, Stanley realized as Butters was chatting, greater than a decade—Stanley _wasn't_ sure if he strictly considered Butters a friend. He managed to settle on something to say, after gaping at Butters as he hummed, slicing bread: "Thank you for having me up. Thank you for feeding me."

"I hope you won't be a stranger!" Even as Butters said this, Stanley knew he almost certainly would; they were not really _friends_ , Stanley thought, as he studied the salt and pepper shakers, shaped like ladies' handbags. "It's only repaying the kindness you showed in having me over to your flat."

The thing was, Stanley really _hadn't_ ; what'd he'd done was invite over his little university clique of gay friends, and Butters fit neatly into that and so he had come, too, with Bradley in tow, in the old-fashioned uniform of oil-slick trousers and soft sweater, baggy in the arms and nipped at the waist. Stanley hadn't got any food _or_ furniture at the time, and in a state of regular inebriation finding the loo had seemed like a task, let alone the speed-laced fugues of late Saturday evenings. "You're not much of a hostess," Kyle had said, and now that he had his own flat it felt more comfortable to settle up there before heading out, or it would when it was finished being remodeled.

But, being decently (if not well) mannered, Stanley said, "Oh, of course, I mustn't," and watched Butters smear salad cream on bread and all but throw a skillet on his cooktop and begin piling up slices of Dairylea—too many, Stanley felt, but he wasn't going to pass comment. "Well, cheers, this is a nice place. The drag circuit must pay better than I thought."

Butters took this at face-value. "Oh, honestly. How much did you think it paid?"

"Better than a master's," Stanley guessed. Their friend Eric especially had made fun of Butters for pursuing it, and he had graduated quietly, saying nothing to anyone until Bradley had drunkenly blathered about it.

"Oh, well." Something, margarine probably, began sizzling on the hob. "That's one privilege of being gay, I suppose—the two-income household."

Now it was Stanley's turn to demure, because he knew nothing about that. "You could always change your mind, put your wife to work."

"That's domestic labor." The sizzling stopped; a smell filled the small, badly ventilated kitchen: hot fat, charred bread. "And wouldn't that just be having it all?"

Quietly, Stanley reached for a napkin from the stack on the table; they were sitting under a paperweight from Brighton Beach. Had Butters performed down there? Stanley wouldn't ask; the stress of anticipating a long-winded answer outweighed the curiosity. He folded the paper napkin into his lap, replaced the memento, kept his mouth tight.

"Tea with your toastie?" Butters set down one plate, with four half-sandwiches on it. It stunk of something, not bad per se but familiar in a way Stanley didn't care for. A random thought popped into his head: _This is England_ , it told him. _This is your life_.

Stanley had never had a clear idea of what his life might be; he had been abroad but only to Paris, so England was, if not all, then certainly most of what he knew. "Yes, thanks," he said, declining to reach for a sandwich half until Butters had helped himself. "Whatever's there."

"Yorkshire Gold," Butters said. Across the kitchen, Stanley heard the burner clicking to life again, trying to ignite. "Oh, I haven't quite figured this thing out yet. Oh, ah—there it goes."

Butters was from up north somewhere; he had the accent to show for it. "Something from home?"

"Something on reduction," said Butters. He came back to the table with two mugs, set them down, and then squeezed himself into the chair opposite Stanley. "Start eating, please!" He helped himself to a sandwich. He held it out over the single plate, and the three other half-sandwiches atop it, oozing white from their middles and lightly yellowish brown at the edges and on top. "I'm retiring."

"But you're just building out the shop," Stanley said, not yet reaching for a sandwich.

"From the circuit, I'm afraid. That shop—isn't Brad sweet to build it for me? He's so wrong about the bench." Butters sighed. "I'm going legitimate. Isn't it time? I cannot do this until I'm thirty."

The idea of Butters giving up drag performance struck Stanley as—well, the truth was that he tried to see his life as a kind of narrative, and often fell back into his more novelistic view of interactions. Character makes a revelation; character has an emotional response. But the information became caught between the gears: one was nostalgia, for Butters' full drag and for the performances she'd given at the little cabaret in Oxford where queers could congregate on certain nights. But, Stanley rationalized, that wasn't so much about Butters, was it, wasn't it more about himself, and the feelings he'd had then, hopeful and defiant, that time of youthful bliss between self-knowledge and worldly knowledge, cosseted in medieval cloisters. How perfectly civilized—and yet how perfectly debauched!—to live in a society of endless uni, all learning and all promise, only room for the unspoilt.

But, Stanley reminded himself, he wasn't a character, regardless of how deeply he felt he must be at times, and Butters wasn't a character; it wasn't a compelling detail how he got toast crumbs on the front of his shirt, noticed them, brushed them away, blushing, and took another bite of his sandwich—only to get crumbs on his shirt again. It was just a man making a mess over lunch. They were just men.

Well, Stanley figured, he liked men quite a bit. Wasn't he supposed to be responding to Butters? Barely remembering what Butters has been on about, he said, "I don't know what to make of that."

"There's nothing wrong in going legitimate," Butters said, leaning into it a bit pointedly. Stanley didn't take that kindly.

Oh, right, that whole thing, the full-fledged engagement with the straight world. Stanley disagreed, but he felt bad saying so because Butters had made him a sandwich. "But there isn't anything right about it, either," Stanley said, trying to finesse his own view and Butters' repudiation thereof. "At least, I mean, not inherently."

"Agree to disagree." Something fell from the second half of the toastie and Butters bit into it—oh, the salad cream. While chewing, he asked, "Well, aside from writing—what's keeping you so busy?"

"Some missionaries came to my door," said Stanley. "Mormons."

"What's a Mormon?" The tea kettle went off; Butters dropped the sandwich half on his plate, and got up, making his way to the stove.

"It sounds very American, but to tell you the truth, I don't know. They were very clean-seeming. One was very interested in knowing that I was a homosexual."

Here Butters returned with two steaming mugs. "Well, how'd they guess at that?"

"Thanks, Miss B. I think it was the naked man I had over."

"Ah." Butters lifted his cup of tea and said, thoughtfully, "Well, I do suppose that's the kind of thing that would tip them off."

"If he'd been clothed he might have passed as a flatmate."

"But, yes, the nakedness, probably very difficult to explain away."

"Well, they were talking about the American Zion, and all this nonsense. They were from Utah. Where is that, even? I haven't the slightest."

"Kyle would know," said Butters. Because Kyle's mother was from America, he was their resident expert on the topic. However little he knew in actuality, they'd never manage to establish—they hadn't even been to America. "You know," Butters continued, dumping spoonsful of sugar into his tea, "we had some missionaries once. Black ones, I mean, I gather from the West Indies. They were Jehovah's Witnesses. What gives someone the gall, do you think?"

"I don't know. I find it highly ironic that these religious types accuse _us_ of going after people, but I've never gone door-to-door making entreaties, have you? I'd get my face smashed in, one presumes. What kind of person thinks someone else's beliefs are so changeable?"

"The British empire, you know," said Butters, dreamily.

Stanley knew, and it made him feel small and complicit. He kept his mouth shut and nibbled at the sandwich until he'd finished one half. When it was clear that he had chosen not to eat the second, Butters leaned over to ask, "Don't you want it?"

It wasn't that Stanley wasn't hungry, he just didn't care for Dairylea. He demurred, saying something about having eaten a large breakfast and expecting to eat a large dinner, but the truth was, something about its blandness felt personal to Stanley. It said too much about Butters and so it said too much about their commonalities, and so it said too much about Stanley himself: bland; white cheese with white-yellow butter (or margarine?) and white cream on white bread. It made him think about old memories again: Token with his seductive refinement, the violent exuberance of everything about Kyle, the coarse skin and grins askew of some uncountable number of boys and men whose names Stanley hadn't learned, for he'd known them for mere hours—in some cases mere minutes.

Butters ate a third half-sandwich in four bites. "Well," he said, mouth still full, brushing the crumbs around the table and then off the table, into his hand. He swallowed. "Let's go see Brad."

"Do think about the offer," Bradley said, closing his clammy hands around Stanley's. "We're going to fill this place up with so many beautiful things." He paused. "To complement Leo, of course."

"Of course." For all Stanley knew the sentiment to be genuine, it only served to remind him that Butters and Bradley conducted their sex life through intermediaries; Butters had a drunken tendency to complain that there were no suitable tops in London. Though that didn't match Stanley's experience—ten years ago, maybe, but not now?—he felt it was appropriate to ask, before heading out, "Miss B, is there a cottage around here?"

"You can use the loo upstairs," said Bradley.

Butters clasped his hand over Bradley's mouth. "But that's not what he wants it for." When Butters took his hand away, Bradley mouthed, "Oh."

 _Oh_ , indeed, as if they didn't give him an answer straight away.

* * *

The rhythms of Stanley's life swayed from predictable to surprising. He went for a swim: it wasn't a gay natatorium, just an easy place for men to congregate, to window-shop as it were. Stanley was new to it, the membership a gift from Wendy on his most recent birthday: "You're thirty now, dearest, you'd better burn off some energy." He'd gone for a swim most mornings—though mornings for Stanley hovered around noon—in recent months. He wasn't sure how she'd come to understand he liked swimming, because he hadn't gone for many years, not since he had grown tired, as an overworked fresher, of competing for a lane at Temple Cowley.

The sounds of the city bathhouse in early afternoon were similar in most regards: the slap of wet feet on old tile, the rain of showers and lockers slamming, everything echoing around the ceramic, metal, and glass. It was better, more serious than Parson's Pleasure, floating languid in the chilly early June waters just astride that island, Mesopotamia; this was a place where straights mingled, unknowing, with subculture on their lunch breaks. (Kyle wouldn't shed his clothing, complained that it was crass. Was it the dons, or the official sanction of it all? "You wouldn't catch me dead there," their tutor once announced, after Craig said his fiancée and her girlfriends had punted by and caught sight of someone's _something_ ; he hadn't been exactly clear on whether it had been the front or back.)

A swim was always invigorating, and so Stanley would then walk, down Southampton Row to High bloody Holborn, shrugging past lawyers, subtly fearing he might run into one he knew in the area. He would arrive in Soho Square and plop down on a bench, taking in the weather (regardless of foggy blur or blinding glare, both eye-watering) and remember, wet hair on his ears, deciding that he ought to live here. Whatever Stanley was reading, he would read it in the park, for one hour or two, whatever time allowed. By then it would be 4 or 5, and the streets would begin to thicken with crowds while the park benches would fill with schoolkids freed or workers recovering.

The anonymity of crowds drove Stanley crazy the way an especially talented lover drove one crazy; one came to the city for this: for the bodies.

Unless he had some business—drinks at Wendy's as she dressed to head out with her husband to some party; his usual Monday-nighters with Kyle at the abysmal pub they really ought to cease frequenting—Stanley would then walk home, ever so uphill toward Islington until he veered away to go up Old Street, hang left at the roundabout, and land back at home for a long night in of reading, aimless typing, aimless drinking, mug after mug of lukewarm tea he let cool for too long, telling himself the next one would be steaming hot and he would drink it head-on, straight-away, no waiting. This had been his daily routine for so many months now that its repetition was a comfort. He knew what he would return to: stacks of novels, perpetually empty cupboards, typewriter.

One day Stanley came home from all that to a strapping young blond man on the stairs outside of his flat, and it didn't take but a moment for Stanley to realize, oh, it's that missionary.

"Elder Harrison," he said, trying not to seem surprised—though he was, of course, and especially that he'd remembered the name. He grappled at what to say, given how unexpected it was. There were tears in the young man's eyes and Stanley could only manage "Hullo"—emphasis on the _huh_.

"I'm supposed to be at dinner," Elder Harrison, struggling to his feet. "I bet they're looking for me."

Stanley guessed that _they_ were the other missionaries, or the overseers in any case. Did missionaries have overseers? They must.

"Well, if you've come for a substitute, I'm afraid you'll be somewhat disappointed. I keep a rather bare cupboard."

"I came because." He wiped his eyes and, after he'd blinked, Stanley could see that he wasn't actively crying but, rather, had stopped some time ago. "I came because I'm a homosexual."

For all his self-certainty, Stanley had rarely felt so shocked. "Well," he said, fumbling in his pocket for the key to his front door. "That's—you might be hungry anyhow."

"Thanks so much, but, I'm not. I know this is pretty forward of me, maybe I'm having a moment of temporary insanity, but—I think God has maybe told me to come here? As if you could help me?"

"It depends what you need help with, Elder Harrison." Finally, Stanley managed to unfasten the deadbolt. He pulled out his key. "I couldn't tell you how _not_ to be one. It simply isn't possible. You're stuck like this, I'm afraid."

"I, uh. Shoot. I think maybe I want to be one? I'm going to heck for this, I really am."

"Stanley." He offered his hand. "My name's Stanley."

"And I'm Gary," said Gary. "That's my real name. Please don't call me Elder Harrison."

"Well, it's nice to properly meet you, Gary."

"And it's nice to see you again, Stan."

Stanley's first thought was to correct Gary, and he did almost utter the words on the tip of his tongue: _Please don't call me Stan._ But then he decided there'd be time for that later. "Well, Gary," he said, pulling open the door. "You're welcome to come inside."

* * *

Gary held his mug to his chest and stared ahead, unfocused; he was neither looking at Stanley nor avoiding his gaze, merely unfocused, fixed on no particular locus.

Stanley wasn't quite sure what to do. He kept busying himself with little things here and there—sweeping some crumbs from the counter, filling a new fountain pen with blue-back ink, arranging and then rearranging the tin of tea bags. Perhaps it would be best to transition to loose-leaf, Stanley thought. There was a particularly fussy thing about tending to loose tea that attracted Stanley, and if he were to cultivate a practice of it, well, that might take up some time. He'd have to use up all of these tea bags first, though, all the lapsangs and oolongs, of which he had both Darjeeling and Assam, and a few Lady Grey packets from Twinings and PG Tips because it was boring, and also thrifty. It occurred to Stanley that maybe some of these old tea bags, from who could even say where, were stale. And maybe, just maybe, he shouldn't have served any to Gary.

Not that Gary seemed to be drinking his tea. He was just hugging the mug; Stanley hadn't seen his lips touch it. "Are you all right?" he finally asked, snapping the tea tin shut. "Do you like tea?"

He seemed caught off-guard by this question, as if his opinion didn't much matter. "Well," he said, "I don't drink it."

"It's all right, no one's perfect," said Stanley. "Americans prefer coffee, is that right? My best friend is an American, or his mother is, and I hear all sorts of things." Stanley sat down on his trunk and tried to smile. They'd told him once, not quite ten years ago, that if he wanted to seem nice and friendly and normal, he'd better start smiling more. And it wasn't that Stanley thought that advice was so good, or that he should finally heed it; it was more that, so long as Gary had sought him out again, it seemed somehow imperative to Stanley that Gary like him.

"I mean, I've never drunk any tea whatsoever." Gary lowered the mug onto the trunk, pushing it away from Stanley's thighs. He looked Stanley right in the eyes. "I've never had coffee, either."

"Then what do you drink?"

"Hot water with lemon."

"Are you joking?"

"Sometimes hot cocoa. Do you have cocoa? I'm sorry, it's rude of me to ask. I shouldn't've asked. Boy, that was rude."

"It wasn't rude," said Stanley, "but, no, I haven't got any cocoa. Or a lemon. But I can give you hot water, if that's what you want."

"I kind of want to drink the tea, actually."

"All right—" Stanley reached for the mug, but Gary got to it first. "If you're going to drink tea, dear, you should drink it hot."

But Gary didn't seem to care. He gulped it like it was water, as if he didn't really like it. As he was contemplating his second sip there was a look on his face as if he hadn't really enjoyed it. "We don't drink tea because of the caffeine." When he wiped his lips with the back of his hand, Stanley wanted to grab his wrist and suck the tea off of it.

"And this is all a Mormon dictate?"

"Yeah."

"It sounds quite prohibitive."

"You don't even know," said Gary. "You should see my underwear."

This was the wrong thing to say to Stanley, who wouldn't have minded dispensing with the underwear altogether. Yet he felt some responsibility of caution here, some unknown restraint he'd seemingly just developed. This poor boy had never even had tea before; he didn't appear to like it much, hadn't taken another sip, but he was wearing an expression that seemed caught between pure joy and utter want. It was an expression Stanley knew well.

"I'm so sick of it," Gary said. "I thought coming here would help, I thought going on a mission would help, but nothing's ever gonna help me, is it?"

"I don't know," said Stanley. "What do you need help with?"

"Mormons are actually supposed to want things. Our whole deal is going West, finding the books—"

"The what, dear?"

"—the books, the plates, the new gospel. God is still speaking and we're supposed to listen. We're supposed to prosper. Financially. Corporally. You know? Mormons are _supposed_ to want things. It's nearly impossible _not_ to be saved! Some religions are ascetic, but we're not like that. It's just one or two things we can't have. If you think about it. In the grand scheme of things. But I care too much—how am I supposed to prosper if I can't have the things I really want?"

"This all sounds very familiar to me," said Stanley. "But I can't counsel you to lose your faith over a cup of tea. I'd say it was worth it, but you didn't seem to enjoy it much."

"I didn't. It's not the tea."

"Oh?"

"I want you to show me what it's like," said Gary. "I don't want to go back there."

"To the mission?"

"I don't want to go back to the States."

"I'm not going to tell you to."

"I've never met anyone like you before."

"I'm not particularly unique," said Stanley, though admitting it hurt—in some senses he had always wished to be unique more than anything, and that was the attribute he felt he most valued in other people.

"I mean, you're openly homosexual!"

"We like the word 'gay,' actually, it's got a sort of jolly ring to it. 'Queer' if you have to put a negative slant on it, which we all do at some point, believe me. It makes the whole thing a bit more palatable to the straights. I guess it's true there aren't a lot of open gays, as you say, just a lot of open secrets."

"That's what I want!"

"Oh, good," said Stanley, who was internally panicking.

"Here." Gary stood and put the mug down, untucking his shirt as quickly as he could manage. "Look at this, check this out."

Stanley could only gape as Gary began to peel off his clothing: first he untucked the crisp, white button-down with short sleeves and narrow lapels, then he loosened his belt, then he began to unbutton the shirt, until he had opened it halfway, to his sternum. Then his face became pink, and he buckled the belt again, and his fingers returned to the next shirt button, as if to resume—but he couldn't, and his fingers stilled.

"Well," said Gary, "you get the idea. See?"

"See what?"

"The undergarments," said Gary. "The temple garments." He picked at it. "You know, this old thing."

"I thought that was an undershirt." This gave Stanley cause to think about what he was wearing: a polo that clung to his body like the dust clung to the rocks his father used to give him as birthday presents. _I don't need him_ , Stanley thought to himself, though only for a moment; of course he needed his father, if only for the money, but more for the reminder of who and what he was not and could never be: productive, professional, patriarchal. Accomplished. Angry.

"Well," said Stanley, less because he had anything in particular on his mind but, really, to get his father off of it. "I've only got the one bed, but there's plenty of floor. If you need a place to stay, I mean."

"You mean, for tonight?"

Stanley was never sure of why he offered it, but he did with nary a second guess, offhanded and breezily: "As long as you like."

Gary began to rebutton his shirt. "I know it's an awful imposition," he said, "and the mission is pretty steep, especially here in London so it's too bad I don't speak another language so I could have done somewhere cheaper, and I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't have _that_ much money—"

"I don't sell it," Stanley interrupted.

"Don't sell what?"

"Sex." When Gary didn't say anything, Stanley added, "I'd be lying if I said I'd never _bought_ it, but I've never sold it."

"I didn't mean for—that! I just meant, oh, sheeh." Gary put his head in his hands, just briefly. He looked up. "I meant, to thank you I'd buy dinner, or—but, there's lots of ways I can chip in, if you like, I'm useful. I can be handy. I mean—I'm putting my foot in my mouth, aren't I? I don't know thing one, do I? You haven't _really_ paid for—for _it_ , Stan, have you?"

"Once or twice." Stanley paused. "Accidentally."

"Is that what homosexuals—what gays do?"

"Darling." With intent, Stanley hitched his voice as high as he felt it would comfortably go: "That is what _men_ do."

Gary began laughing.

* * *

There was much to show Gary—perhaps too much. Summers ago Stanley had been new to London, and afraid, and feeling tentative in the hands of a much-trusted guide. Everything was new that July: the grandiosity of the Covent Garden opera house; the scuffling of bankers' leather soles on the pavement lining planted city squares; the patter of gay men around the narrow corners of Soho, the damp old brick around them hardly able to contain the arch, the shrill, the tell-tale click of teeth-sucking that was half-hiss and half-serious. It had all been new new new and Stanley had fallen deeply in love, both with the city and with his tour guide. He should have remembered that aspect when he agreed to show Gary the town.

Instead, Stanley remembered only the first sights of museum interiors and café menus, his first sunset on the Primrose Hill and his last morning in Fortnum & Mason, where he bought a pricey tin of biscuits to bring back to his parents. He remembered the formidable outcry from his mother, "These are far too nice for us!" In his thirties now and more assured Stanley knew that, yes, they had probably been far too nice, but at the time his heart was so swollen that he was convinced each of his gestures would now be an act of love itself.

He took Gary out sightseeing one morning with the intention to replicate that love, to make himself someone who loved again, not for want of sex but in the plain way Christians spoke of: a kindness, a blessing. Later Stanley would see: he should have known better.

But he didn't, and so Gary went out with him to a breakfast at a dim café in the shadow of the Barbican. Stanley asked for a fry-up and a pot of tea. The fact was, Stanley couldn't afford two breakfasts: his money went to keep the lights on and, as soon as he had any extra, getting himself intoxicated in the most convenient possible manner. It varied, mostly sweet wines and stiff liquors if Stanley could afford them, and never mixed drinks unless he was handed one without asking. Kyle was prone to offering something with syrup or fruit juice in it. There were drugs of all kinds in London in those days—though Stanley's relationship with it went back only a sparse decade, so he'd developed the suspicion that there always had been—and sometimes Kyle would be charitable and help Stanley buy the smallest portion of cocaine to split, and they'd sniff it in the back room of wherever they'd happened to have purchased it. Stanley read a lot but he tried to source his books from the library, or else Butters would get them for him, or else he'd try to read them on the shop shelves and pray there was still a copy when he came back to pick it up at the next chapter. He felt guilty when he bought books, which he did, in his own opinion, too frequently.

Food was a distant and overlooked issue. Stanley picked at things, let Kyle make him dinner, ate bananas which had gone a bit sordid or tinned beans for his sole meal that day and, on the whole, had just trained himself to not be very hungry. When Stanley said, "I don't usually eat like this," it wasn't just because the entire thing was a bit much; he didn't have the resources, on the whole, to get many meals out at all lately.

Gary beamed at the food, in awe. "Is that really blood sausage?"

"No, that's a Cumberland," said Stanley. "This is the black pudding." He used a fork to cut the wedge of it in two. "Here we've some beans, sautéed mushrooms, these overcooked tomatoes, undercooked eggs—break the yolks, if you want." They'd been cooked in so much oil that the whites were almost Spanish-style, the edges nearly burnt. The yolks were still loose, though, the result of a cheap pan, maybe.

"What do you eat for breakfast in America?" Stanley asked between bites. It wasn't as if he didn't know; he had read, after all, an awful lot, and seen quite a few movies, and stayed with Kyle's family when they were younger. His mother, Sheila, did cook on occasion—though she was in Parliament, actually, so the occasions on which she cooked were typically limited, and on weekends they ate only cereal, Weetabix or its relatives. It wasn't as if America was so exotic, or as if Stanley couldn't imagine what they ate: the same things, just a bit different. It was no Marrakesh, no Nairobi: they ate bacon in America like the English did. "Streaky bacon," Kyle called it, the fat marbling the flesh instead of gathering at the edge. Just a different cut, really. Nothing so special it merited further investigation.

Stanley just wanted to hear what Gary had to say, was all.

Gary used the napkin to wipe brown sauce from his lips before answering. "Oh, what a super question. We eat all sorts of things, nothing like this. I mean, we have eggs, of course, and tomatoes, and sausages—I guess you wouldn't eat the tomatoes at breakfast, but sausage and egg, and our bacon is different, hm. In an omelet, maybe. Probably toast, and hash browns."

"Hash browns?"

"Oh, yeah," said Gary. "My mother makes really good hash. Corned beef hash."

"It sounds Irish."

"Heck if I know," said Gary. "Can't cook. You get it in a can, right? And my mother would form it into patties and fry it up on the griddle—real nice. But, hash browns are just potatoes, maybe potatoes with some onion, maybe some peppers in there if you have leftovers. And you just fry it up on the griddle, and pile that onto the plate."

No, it didn't sound much different at all.

"And pancakes and waffles. That's what they made us at the mission if they served breakfast, but my mother's are much better. She had an old recipe that her mother gave her, where she'd put a teaspoon of malt powder in the batter. Good stuff. I had half a mind to ask her for the recipe, but..." He grew quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he said, after a deep breath. "Malt powder, that's her secret ingredient. What does your mother make?"

"Oh, who can remember," said Stanley, because his own mother was the last thing he ever wished to speak of.

"She must have some specialties, though."

"She really just cooks for my father, and he's not especially discerning, though he is an intolerable old ass."

Nearly imperceptibly, Gary recoiled. "Stan," he said, "don't call your dad an—" there was some hesitation "—an ass." It was the first time Stanley had seen him look truly disapproving.

Stanley poked under the top of the chrome teapot in front of him; some more hot water would really do the trick, the tea all drained, a mere mouthful of it lingering in the bottom of his ceramic cup. Maybe that was why he wasn't getting a refill. Out of nowhere, uninvited, Stanley imagined Kyle chiding him, "Get up and ask for some more, dear, it's no use sitting there on your dish just yearning for it." But if Stanley got up he'd miss whatever Gary might have said if he hadn't gotten up and left the table.

So Stanley sighed and said, "But he is, though."

"My mother says, you can kill em with kindness."

The bright optimism was nearly too much to bear. "He'd kill me first if he got the chance, though. No kindness involved, though perhaps he'd think of it as putting me out of my misery. That's a kindness to him, I suppose."

Swallowing a mouthful of black coffee, Gary asked, "What's he do?"

"He's a geologist. A fluvial geomorphologist to be precise."

"Oh, that's so interesting! You make a nice living doing that?"

"Well," said Stanley, wishing to be off the topic immediately, if not to invent a way to rewind the conversation so as to avoid saying anything about his father in the first place, "I don't know that such a thing as the independent fluvial geomorphologist exists, but my father has a big professorship at Oxford, and that seems to suit him."

"Didn't you say that was where you went?"

"Did I? I did. Go there, I mean, I don't recall if I mentioned."

"That's so interesting."

"God, no it isn't," said Stanley, who was beginning to resign himself to getting up and asking for another pot of tea.

"You know, you shouldn't be so hard on yourself." Gary leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. "You're the most interesting man I've met in Britain, and I wouldn't lie."

"I'm the only man you've met in Britain."

"Nah, that's not true, I met everyone who opened the door."

"The only man you've spent enough time with to _find_ interesting," Stanley ventured. He wished to be done with the conversation. "How's your coffee?"

Gary sipped it, thinking for a moment. "It really is pretty bad."

Stanley found himself laughing, and as he looked across the table Gary was smiling—and then Gary was laughing too.

* * *

There was only one other man Stanley laughed with, really laughed—not a polite chuckle or a dry _ha_ or a guffaw at the antics of a queen flinging barbs at the outside world from the bosom of a cabaret where the bouncer gave patrons a greasy-red full-mouthed kiss on the cheek to mark who'd paid the cover. There was no readmittance, not by policy but by practice, since few would leave that visible smudge before going out into the real world.

It was only once Stanley began to explain who Kyle was that he realized they hadn't been laughing together much, lately. "My old flatmate," he tried, and it didn't sound quite correct. "I suppose we're best friends, if you had to put a label on it." Even as he said it, something throbbed in him—some pain.

Gary, on the other hand, was perched on the bed as Stanley dug around his room for the essentials: his handful of legal tender and the paperback he was reading (something American: _Styles of Radical Will_ , a trait Stanley often worried he was lacking, and tried very hard to foster within himself).

"You see him often?"

"We have dinner most weeks. Nothing fancy, at a pub."

"It must be nice to have a great friend like that. He must mean a lot to you."

"Well, he does." Stanley paused, reluctant to reveal how much, or in what way. He wasn't sure what the point in keeping it from Gary was—Gary wasn't Stanley's boyfriend, and neither was Kyle; Stanley should have friends and go see them, so what was it to Gary if he did? "I should like you to come because going without you feels rude, and yet I fear Kyle's reaction if I turned up in the company of a stranger."

"Oh no! Well, you can't have that. Don't worry about me, Stan. I'll be fine here, I promise. I'll go around the corner and get a sandwich, maybe. Don't worry about me."

Thanking Gary for his patience, Stanley worried anyhow. His tolerance for Kyle was like a ship on the ocean; it rose and fell depending on conditions. Or maybe it was that he was the ship and Kyle was the ocean; Kyle's moods affected him, could lift him up or ferry him quite far afield or even capsize him, leave him drifting. Or, or—maybe it was that Kyle was the ship, and Stanley's love was the water, and ... and, well, Stanley worked and worked through this metaphor on the Tube, and it was probably the train's rocking motion that got him thinking like that, but no amount of concentration led Stanley toward a conclusive ocean-ship metaphor with which he was really happy. What did it matter, anyway? He could not end his love for Kyle any more than he could end himself. Not even Kyle could end it, and Kyle had, even if unwittingly, tried pretty hard.

This is why he'd never write another book, Stanley figured. The only economy into which he could invest even a micron of effort was his longing and longing for someone he could never, ever have. As he struggled up the road through the rain to the Duke of Buckingham, Stanley's self-loathing bloomed from latent to consuming and he tried to force himself to think of anything but Kyle, if only for the few minutes before Kyle showed up.

When Kyle did not show up on time, though, Stanley took a seat at the bar. It was all pretty typical.

"I've been waiting forever," said Stanley when Kyle did arrive, though it wasn't true; he'd been waiting only 10 minutes. Also, Kyle was usually late, and Stanley did wonder on occasion if perhaps he shouldn't temper his expectations and plan to be tardy meeting Kyle himself. With my luck, Stanley figured, were I only to try that Kyle would suddenly discover the heretofore unknown benefit of timeliness, and sing me quite an aria about how inconsiderate it was to keep a person waiting.

Still, with Gary back home, Stanley was not thrilled to be made to endure it—why should he have to wait for Kyle at all?

"Oh, you know how it is, with the office, and the—just, miniature crises, one after another. Though, I suppose you don't know how it is, you don't work. Can you get me something? I need to use the toilet." Kyle flung off his coat, a shapeless macintosh, and he turned to go find the loo sooner than he'd even arrived. Stanley took a glance at Kyle's backside, as he was wont to do; it was a nice one, and with some regret and fondness he recalled pushing against it, and into it, for the first time back at uni. That was before Stanley had made sex into a hobby, and just thinking of Kyle's half-drunken pleas for _harder, deeper_ made Stanley wistful for both Kyle's enthusiasm and his own innocence. It had taken a lot of practice to learn to go hard and deep on command, and a lot of experience to do it without being ordered.

In those days Kyle'd had painted toenails and a big bush of hair that he refused to trim. Sometimes Stanley wondered if Kyle teased it, to make it bigger; he did dye it with henna, though it was already auburn. He'd shorn it going into their last year at Oxford, and now kept it pretty tidy, with shaved sides and large sideburns. Stanley, who had been wearing sideburns out of laziness since 1962, hated that they did not seem to be going out of style. He missed looking bad all the time, his very presence an affront.

As soon as Kyle was seated again at the bar, Stanley said, "I work. Just because I've no office job doesn't mean I don't work."

"On occasion," said Kyle. "Well, all right, calm down. Don't be hurt, it's only true. Are you eating anything?"

"I could do," said Stanley, "why, are you? We could go to Chinatown after, get something easy." And cheap, Stanley thought, hating to come off as miserly.

"No, that's all right. Listen, hand me that menu, will you? Thanks, dear. I'm seeing that solicitor this weekend, from Gray's, didn't I tell you? I have to restrain myself somewhat." He sounded as if he'd been taking speed, all of this information coming in an onslaught. "So I can't get anything, really. Here, order something." He thrust the menu into Stanley's hands.

"Why? If you're not eating—"

"Well, you order something and I'll eat from your plate."

"Just get your own dish, get a side of peas or something."

"Stanley, don't be stupid, I'm starving. You should get— get a pie or something, with gravy and mash, that'll be nice."

"What if I don't want pie? Get your own pie."

"I told you, I'm dieting."

"Some diet," said Stanley, but he put in an order for a steak and kidney pie, with a request for a Fuller's; Kyle asked for a half-pint shandy. After they'd ordered, he said, "It isn't any less if you eat it off my plate."

"Nice try," said Kyle. "You might have gone with, you're perfectly thin already, don't starve yourself."

"As you're aware, darling, I needn't tell you."

"It's still nice to hear!" Kyle put an arm on the counter. "Are you going to ask me about my date?"

"What should I ask?"

"I don't know, dear, be inventive."

"Okay." Stanley breathed deeply. "So he's a solicitor, is he? Did your father set you up?"

"Oh, I was hoping you'd ask that. No! I found him myself. In the personals in the back of _Gay News_. How about that?"

"Well, I don't _know_ anything about that," said Stanley. "Never used the personals. I prefer to meet my dates more, um. Personally."

"I know." It came out cold.

"Well, if it's a blind date, really, what's the difference between writing to someone in the back of the paper and meeting them in a toilet or something? With the former you've got a certain amount of work ahead of you, not to mention paying for postage. Since you have to at least make the attempt to get to know someone before you go out, and so on."

"You know an awful lot about this thing you haven't tried!"

"It's not as if I've _never_ looked in the back of _Gay News_ , darling."

"Fantabulous. Well, the difference between the back of the paper and just cottaging yourself up a trick is that with the former you get a chance to know someone before you meet them, and therefore there's a better chance you'll see them again after. If you just meet someone in a toilet _or something_ "—Kyle made little inverted comma with his finger—"you don't really have a through-line to the next bit, do you?"

"Well, that depends on the next bit, I suppose."

Kyle rolled his eyes. "Going out again."

"How much out do you think it's necessary to go? It's not as if you won't go back to his place."

"My mother thinks if I didn't I'd have a better shot at the second date."

"I've heard that before."

"Well, there's no credence to it, is there?" Kyle asked. "If he wants a second date he wants a second date. If he doesn't, I might as well get it in while the getting is good. Pull the cart into the stable, you know."

"But is the getting ever good with these guys?"

"Oh, it can be." Kyle took a prolonged drink of his shandy. It was nearly empty now. "It can be."

"And you think it will be if you eat dinner off of my plate instead of your own?"

"Precisely."

"I have a boy living with me," said Stanley.

It wasn't too hard to read the look on Kyle's face: some shock, some jealousy. " _Excuse me_?"

"A Mormon missionary. He is from Colorado via Utah. Or, no, he was born in Colorado but went to school in Utah and he lives there now. Have you been there?"

"Have I been where, to Utah? Or to Colorado?"

"Either."

"Well, neither, and why would I?" Kyle took a massive gulp to finish his shandy. "Are you insane? What is even happening? What am I even supposed to ask you about this? A _boy_ living with you? How old? Jesus, I hope he isn't underage!"

"He is not underage. He's twenty-five."

"A child!" Kyle shrieked, placing a hand on his chest. "He's a baby!"

"A twenty-five-year-old is not a _baby_ or a child, Kyle, that is perfectly ridiculous. Quit it."

"Quit what? Excuse me, barkeep!" Kyle began to wave frantically at the bartender. "Hello, help!"

When the bartender came by, he asked, "What's a matter? This guy bothering you?" He gestured to Stanley. "I'll take him off your hands."

"Oh, don't bother, he's already engaged, to some twenty-five-year-old he's got living with him! Wouldn't you call that robbing the cradle?"

"I don't know," said the bartender, "but I got other customers. Don't yell 'help' at me next time if you ain't in danger and don't need a drink."

"I am in danger of losing my faith," said Kyle.

"For your trouble, I'll take another Fuller's," said Stanley. He pulled a coin from his pocket and pushed it across the bar. He made a point not to look at Kyle again until the second beer was in his hands. He drank deeply, and turned back to Kyle.

"So," Kyle spat. So, yes, he was furious. Well, why should he be? Stanley wondered.

"Nothing untoward has happened," said Stanley.

It was not reassuring. "I don't believe you," Kyle said. "Why should I believe you?"

"Well, you don't even know him." Stanley was low on patience for this particular interrogation.

"What is there to know about a kept boy?"

This made Stanley slam his can down. Some popular song was playing in the pub and the bartender was singing along with it; the vocals were a woman's, the chorus a repeating spondee drawn out of pain, and Stanley didn't know who was singing. "Oh, come off it, he's not a kept boy. He's a missionary, for Christ's sake." Stanley saw no change in Kyle's expression, and so he continued: "And honestly, what is it to you if he is? Which he is _not_ , but, I am a grown man, and he is a grown man, and sex between two grown men is legal in this country, as well you know, so it's none of your business—it's _really_ none of your business."

"Except," said Kyle coldly, "that you just _told_ me."

Stanley said nothing, drinking his beer.

"I mean, it's a little late for the old 'it's none of your business' line, dear, isn't it," Kyle continued, his tone brightening. "You have done _dreadful_ things with men, Stanley, which were probably illegal anyhow, and _my mother is a government official_ —"

"Well, whose isn't?" Stanley tried to joke.

"Yours isn't!"

"Maybe she's been a spy this whole time."

"No, she hasn't!"

Kyle seemed desperate, his shandy drained. So he snatched the can of Fuller's and helped himself to it. In a miserable voice, he asked, "How long have you been concealing this from me?"

"Er. I haven't been."

Kyle narrowed his eyes. "You don't have any credibility with me! I don't have to believe you."

"I suppose you don't have to believe me," said Stanley. Typically his patience for Kyle was enduring, but today ... today he just couldn't summon the will to indulge Kyle's paranoia. They hadn't been lovers for a long time, now; to what did Kyle think he was entitled? "But you also don't have to be my friend, and you don't have to meet me for drinks, or eat off my plate, or expect me to pay for the dinner you made me order for you, which I'm sure you're planning to do. You didn't have to show up here and tell me about your date with some chap from the back of _Gay News_."

"Friends tell each other things," Kyle said, a bit more subdued.

"And I'm telling you about Gary," said Stanley. "We've not done anything together. He knocked on my door a little over a week ago. This isn't a story about a love affair. It's not even a story about sex. He's a gay virgin and he's lost. It's a story about my savior complex if it's a story about anything."

"Well, at least you got that part."

"Please, darling. Give me a little credit."

"I want to," said Kyle.

"Oh, boy," said Stanley. "No, you don't."

Kyle shrugged. "Do you think you deserve some?"

"Well, yeah. Of course I do. At least _some_."

At this point the bartender slid their steak and kidney pie across the bar. The Duke of Buckingham had really awful food; the pie was accompanied by a lump of mashed potatoes swimming in brown gravy (which was probably made from crystals) and a handful of peas. The only good thing on the menu was the side of chips, which were available through some quirk of fate topped, or not, with the same gravy; these were fried twice at the outset and heavily salted to finish, and Stanley had begun many a night of extended revelry with a dish of them. Stanley wished Kyle could have ordered his own main so that he could have enjoyed an order of chips, but he couldn't afford both. He probably couldn't afford the pie, if he was being honest with himself, especially since he now had a second mouth to feed, it seemed.

Sweetly, Kyle asked the bartender for a second set of flatware and another shandy.

"If you're looking to slim down you oughtn't drink that," Stanley said. He meant it cruelly. To make a point he slid the pie toward Kyle.

Drawing the fork from his rolled serviette, Kyle said, "It's really evil of you." He broke the crust and steam escaped the pie, billowing up and away from the plate before dissipating over the bar.

"Making fun of your sorry little pledges to diet? I think it would be crueler if you actually needed to lose weight, but you do not! I keep telling you. You look fine. You look beautiful, actually."

Managing a slight smile, Kyle said, "Thanks. But, I meant about the boy."

"Gary is his name."

"What's he doing now, this Gary?"

"I don't know. Reading. Perhaps he's taken himself on a stroll."

"Maybe he's robbing you."

"Well, if he wants Professor Randy Marsh's undergraduate papers, he's welcome to them. I wouldn't mind being rid of that."

"What about _your_ papers?"

"Whatever," said Stanley. Finally, he used his fork to spear a bit of meat from the pie. "The books are on shelves, or maybe not, but the point is, I don't need the papers any longer."

"What about when you're a famous author and someone wants to study your works?" It was a naïve question. Stanly laughed at it. "Oh, don't! You'll never be famous with that attitude."

"I don't want to be famous." Stanley put the forkful of pie in his mouth. It wasn't delicious, so he chewed slowly.

"Famously stupid, maybe," Kyle seethed. "Famously broke. I bet this boy is hiding something. What on earth kind of boy would want to move in with _you_?"

Stanley swallowed. "Well," he said, wiping his mouth. "If you want to know so badly, I suppose you'll just have to come and meet him."

When Kyle had gone and Stan was left alone, he signaled for another can of beer. It came right away, along with a sympathetic look from the bartender.

"I see you here every week," he said, "and I can't quite imagine why you put up with all that."

"Force of habit," said Stanley. "Plus, I love him, sort of."

This statement raised the bartender's eyebrow. "Sort of?" he asked. "What's that supposed to mean? I reel 'em in and let 'em go. Keeps 'em circling the line, if you get me."

"I get you. I don't know." Stanley thought for a moment. "I suppose love is like anything else."

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

"How do you mean?

"It diminishes," said Stanley. "The last time I loved it was like rotting, which was painful. Like a piece of me was going gangrenous. It was necrotic, like ... like this hideous thing I just wanted to slice off my body, I suppose. Like it was exposed for so long without shelter that it got some infectious agent into it and the whole thing went sour. It was love, and then it wasn't. It just—it got spoilt. It spoils, and then you bin it." Stanley took a deep breath, looking away from the bartender. "But, old love. Love under pressure. It petrifies, it hardens up, it gets brittle. It calcifies, and you're left with—what, I don't know, some little souvenir of your love. Some little fossil. So it can have some aesthetic purpose, you know, but it diminishes, and gets all nice and compact, and you just...carry it around with you. It's impervious to rot now. But it's affected. It's sort-of love. Love, of a sort."

"That's very pretty."

"Thanks."

The bill was slammed down in front of Stanley. He scanned it, sighing. "Let's have it on the tab, please." he felt for the change in his pocket. "I'll get paid Monday next."

"You keep buying that sort-of lover of yours meals he don't want and you'll be paying up again four Mondays from now."

"Duly noted," Stanley agreed. He left a few pence on the bar, as apology.

* * *

When Stanley returned from his swim on Thursday, Gary greeted him at the door, smiling. Stanley may have had a trick hang about for a day or two before—students, travelers, the aimless. The over-indulged and the under-employed. Gary seemed like all of these, and yet not; he wasn't a trick, for example, and that felt to Stanley like a crucial difference. He hadn't much thought about sex with Gary at all; Gary seemed beyond sex, like the thought of it had never encroached on his psyche. Impossible, Stanley knew; Gary wouldn't be at the flat, wouldn't have come to England at all, without such thoughts.

"Someone's calling," Gary told Stan, easing the heavy door shut behind them. "The phone's been ringing all day, Stan."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I didn't pick it up."

"If you're going to stay here," said Stanley, "you may as well feel comfortable picking up the phone."

"What should I say when I answer it?"

It was only then, tossing his coat onto the sofa, that Stanley realized: his flat was clean. Or, rather, not clean—organized. At least, one corner of it had been; his books were now stacked neatly in columns under the large windows, and the layer of dust his radiator had acquired, which was thick enough to be noticed, had been swept away.

Something about this made Stanley feel—well, he wasn't quite sure he knew. "You didn't have to clean."

"But, Stan, I wanted to," said Gary. "You're letting me stay here and all."

"I suppose," Stanley muttered, and he wandered over to the kitchen, only to find his sink empty of dishes and teaspoons with brown stains where tea had pooled, and dried, in their basins.

When the phone next rang, Stanley made certainly to pick it up straight away, for he knew who was calling, and why.

"I want to meet him," Kyle said. "The curiosity's eating away at me."

"That the only thing that's eating you? How did it go, with that solicitor?"

"Don't pry, Stanley, it's not becoming."

"You've just invited yourself over," said Stanley, "so who's prying?"

"Why are you being a bitch?"

"Aren't you at work?"

"So what if I am?" Kyle asked.

"Well, this call doesn't strike me as professional, is all."

"Oh, and what would you know about it?"

"I have no less experience making telephone phone calls than you do, I'm sure."

"Oh, Stanley, you old goat, you're being obtuse. I meant I have more experience being professional, of course."

Stanley might have been insulted, were he not amused. "Remind me what sort of noise a goat makes again?"

"I think it's a sort of braying,"

"Darling, no, I'm sure that's donkeys."

Sighing, it sounded like Kyle was on the precipice of losing his patience. "Just in invite me over already. To meet this beau of yours."

It was hardly in Stanley's interest to have Kyle lose anything, patience foremost. "He isn't my beau," Stanley might have said, though he also knew it was pointless to argue. He went to his bookshelf, such as it was, where he'd stuck the sheet of paper on which he'd been keeping his appointments.

The first thing Gary asked, when Stanley told him that Kyle was coming to meet him, was, "Is he a queer, too?"

"Oh boy," said Stanley. "He'd ascend off the mortal plane if he heard you ask that."

* * *

On walking in, Kyle announced, "Well, my dear, I've arrived," to no one. He said it in an airy, overall sort of way, directing it to no particular person so much as the theoretical audience that he probably wished followed him around. He'd decided to dress up as if heading to some impractical theme party: very tight jeans in a kind of aubergine color; an old angora sweater that had been a baby pink at one point but which now seemed a bit faded, the pink somewhat imperceptible under the buttery industrial lighting; a camel hair double-breasted coat that really was a close fit; patterned scarf, too busy for Stanley to make sense of; lavender leather gloves, which Kyle slipped off and tossed onto the kitchen counter. Given the heatwave, it was pure performance; Stanley noticed the sweater darkened at the armpits.

Of course, the only people to witness this scene were Stanley, who had made a mental catalogue of Kyle's most ostentatious garments, and Gary, who looked like he'd never seen anything so entertaining in his life.

"Darling," said Stanley, rushing over to take Kyle's coat. "Look at you."

"I prefer not to." Kyle put his hands directly on his hips. "I'd rather look at this." He strode over to Gary.

It seemed that Kyle had not been anticipating that Gary would engage him, because he took a step back when Gary grabbed one of his hands and said, "It's so wonderful to meet you! I've heard so much about you!"

"God, have you?" Kyle pulled his hand away. "How completely and utterly boring."

"Oh, no," said Gary, taking this seriously, and not as the overblown camping it was. "Everything Stan's said—you sound so interesting!"

"Interesting, am I?" Kyle returned his hands to his hips. "A bit of an exhibit? Were you hoping I'd put on some kind of display?"

Inwardly, Stanley cringed, predominantly at the fact that, well, a display was precisely what Kyle was providing.

"No!" Now Gary was shaking his head and holding his hands open in front of his chest. "Gosh, no, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean—you just seem like such good friends is all! And Stan's been so kind to me, and I just thought, wow, it'd be wonderful to meet his very good friend. He speaks so highly of you!"

It was at this point that Stanley realized he had no control over this situation, but that if it _were_ to ignite, he would be a casualty of the impact all the same. Before Kyle could say another word, Stanley grabbed him by the upper arm, not with force but as a wife might clutch her husband as they drifted down the high street, or off-center through the garden of an Impressionist painting, her gloved hands small and articulate, rendered in exacting care; his indifferent, a detail one might miss even after studying the canvas for ages.

"Darling, a drink? I've sherry."

"Oh, sod your sherry." He shrugged out of Stanley's grasp, sighing. "Yes, of course, I'd love a drink. Thanks."

Immediately, Stanley realized it would be incredibly rude not to offer something to Gary as well—Gary, who was standing there with a half-smile on his gold-toned face, one elbow resting on the back of his hand, cupping his own chin: it looked a bit _so_ , didn't it? But if he offered Gary a drink, Kyle wouldn't feel special.

So, Stanley didn't.

Of course, he then felt bad about it.

Gary continued to babble. "I've heard so much about you," he repeated, "and yet I feel as though I don't know you at all."

Kyle snorted, and snatched the bottle of sherry out of Stanley's hands. "You don't." He seemed more relaxed now that he was, at least, holding a bottle of alcohol. "We've never met."

"But it feels like we have, in some way!"

"Well, we haven't."

"I think because I've heard so much about you," Gary continued, and Stanley realized that for the first time, he was seeing Gary nervous. That second time they'd met, on the stairs, when Gary'd sought him out—that wasn't nerves, Stanley realized, or unease; it was a peculiar sense of determination that, in some Americans, had an uncomfortable quality to his ears. Though, when he thought about it, the only Americans who had ever projected determination for Stanley to witness had been members of Kyle's family: Kyle's mother, for instance, as well as Kyle's cousin, whose name was also Kyle. Spending so much time with a first cousin with the same _exact_ prenomen would have certainly caused _Stanley_ to feel nervous, but no, not these Americans.

Apparently the real Kyle, or at least the Kyle that Stanley knew, had grown tired of waiting for Stanley to hand him a glass, so he went to the cupboard and found one himself. Of course, it wasn't a proper glass, it was a jam jar, and Kyle scowled at it like it was a dish prepared badly at a very fine restaurant.

"I don't drink," Gary was saying, and Stanley knew instantly it was the exact wrong thing to say to Kyle, whose mother may have been brimming with American determination, but that certainly did not stop Kyle from drinking like an Englishman, and to go along with it he was now making a face of utter confusion.

"Oh, is that what's brought you over here? A bit of an alkie, are you?"

"No! No, wow, people don't usually ask that where I'm from. I've never had a drink, actually, I'm a Mormon."

"Stanley said as much, but I wasn't completely sure _what_ that meant." At this point Kyle came to Stanley's side and, in a shadow of all the parental determination he'd probably ever witnessed, wrapped the hand that wasn't holding a jam jar of sherry around Stanley's waist and tipped his head onto Stanley's shoulder. This last bit wasn't the easiest to pull off; Stanley and Kyle were the same height.

Still, it had its intended effect: Gary's eyes went wider than Stanley had ever seen them, and he looked to be swallowing down the whole liter of nervousness where it would slosh around in his stomach for a while and he would feel it every time he shifted his weight, or stood up.

And Stanley could tell, from Kyle's tone, that he'd caught this look, too: "And what, if you don't mind me asking, is a Mormon?"

What Kyle had not taken into account, though, was that unlike the particular type of religious minority with which _he_ was affiliated, the Mormons had achieved their own promised land relatively early on in their franchise, and so Gary had spent his entire life around Mormons. His very presence in Stanley's flat, of course, was testament to the fact that he had initiated the process of changing this; and yet, the fact remained: at least in this one regard, he was immune to feeling bad about being different.

"We're the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints."

"So it's a kind of Christian," Kyle said.

"I'm a Mormon."

"That doesn't _mean_ anything to me."

"Let's go sit on the sofa," said Stanley, who had grown tired of Kyle's weight on him suddenly.

So they all piled onto the couch, Kyle in the middle, and Stanley sat all the way to one end, back rigid against the arm, surveying the scene before him: Kyle cross-armed with his jar in one hand, Gary leaning forward to orate excitedly, the same convoluted story he'd told Stanley that first morning, with the go-nowhere dead-end details. Some of them sounded like omissions, Stanley thought, hearing this for the second time now. The unevenness could have been scarring from excision, the healed-over gouges where the detail had been forgotten, or excised. One never knew with myth, Stanley thought to himself. A novel, a memoir, a poem, even—what modern literature lost in authenticity it gained in polished intent, flourishes of writerly choice choking the truth like beautiful, serpentine weeds until the rotten monument they'd ensnared was all-consumed. That was why he couldn't stand the Greeks or the Eddas or Chaucer or the _Bible_.

Too ancient. Too obvious.

But this is from the eighteen-thirties, Stanley reminded himself, at the same time Kyle burst forth with, "The nineteenth century! That's absurd. I refuse to believe it."

"Oh," said Gary—and not a disappointed _oh_ , but a knowing, conspiring, "Oh!" "People say that a lot."

"Wouldn't a lot of people saying they didn't believe it cause you to doubt—something?"

"Of course not." Gary sat up straighter.

"Because, dear, I am in advertising," Kyle began, setting his drink on the floor, "and I think if I've internalized anything about people, it's that when the people truly don't want something, I mean really reject it, typically that's because you've a bad product."

"Stan told me you were in advertising," Gary chimed. "That's so interesting. That must be really cool, a great job to have."

"But you could sell anything," Stanley said, hoping beyond possibility that he could somehow keep it light.

Kyle retrieved the glass from the floor, but he didn't drink from it, just held it, the perfumed inch of sherry at the bottom beginning to waft across the sofa and into Stanley's field of perception. "Of course I couldn't sell anything. What stupidity. I could sell a good product, or the right product to the right group. But of course, it's not my job to make good products, I just argue people into giving me business."

"Maybe I should just argue people into Mormonism," Gary said, and Stanley understood it to be a joke.

But Kyle hadn't. He learned forward, menacing. "Not if it's stupid."

"So, what about you?" Gary asked. "Are you Anglican? Or are you Catholic like Stan?"

"Ha!" said Kyle, and it wasn't a laugh but a warning, and he wasn't amused but insulted. "How you very dare."

"He's Jewish," said Stanley.

"Oh, now you've ruined it."

"How interesting!" Gary clasped his hands and leaned into Kyle.

Rudely, Kyle turned to Stanley and said, "What I think he fails to understand is that the more times a person pronounces something 'interesting' the less weight that entire concept carries. What an entirely banal and useless thing to say about anything, honestly." He turned back to Gary, drained the end of his sherry, and continued: "What do you mean by that, it's interesting? I really don't understand. What is it that you think you're trying to say?"

Finally, Gary faltered. "I. Um. You know, that's an in—uh, it's a good question. One that I never really thought about." He paused. "I guess it's what I say when I hear something new."

"Someone being Jewish is new to you?"

"Well. Yeah. It is."

"But what do you mean, it's interesting? I could tell you that I ate Weetabix for breakfast, and would that be interesting?"

"I don't know what that is," said Gary. "So, maybe!"

"It's not interesting," said Kyle.

"It's a shredded wheat cereal cake," Stanley explained. "You put it in milk and it goes all soggy."

"Stanley, sweetheart, take a note. Things that are interesting—being Jewish. Eating Weetabix. End of list."

"I can write it down," said Gary. "I know where the pens are." He was just trying to be a little helpful, a little funny. "You forgot advertising. Though that _is_ interesting!"

"I have to go," said Kyle, and he stood up. He made a show of it, dusting off his thighs and adjusting the hem of his jeans and stretching out in such a way that one of his arms was constantly in either Stanley's or Gary's face. "Well," he huffed, "nice seeing you."

It was directed at Gary and this made him flinch, but Gary was too much of a sweetheart not to say, in his kindest voice, "It was awfully nice to meet you."

Stanley could have sworn that Kyle was purposely swaying his hips as he headed for the door.

"I'll see you out," Stanley announced, mostly to Gary. It was a signal—this is normal, it's casual, it's just a nice thing to do. Out of the corner of his eye Stanley noticed Kyle's gloves on the kitchen counter and grabbed them, just as Gary said, "He forgot his gloves—oh!" Now Stanley was relieved to have a reason to jog after Kyle; it was the first time he'd realized that his flat was too large.

"These are yours," he said to Kyle, who was waiting with arms crossed, back to the front door.

"I know that." Scowling, Kyle's eyes narrowed.

"Don't be cross. I haven't done anything wrong."

"Haven't you?"

Over his shoulder, Stanley searched for a glimpse of Gary. He must have remained sitting in the great room where Stanley had left him, and yet there was no sight of him around the timber beams that eked out a floor plan for the flat. Stanley pressed the fingertips of a glove to his lips, and pressed the fingertips to Kyle's cheek. As he did it, he wondered if he shouldn't have done the lips—would it have been campier? Would it have melted Kyle's resolve, offset his anger, burnished his confidence and sense of entitlement?

"See you at the Bucky," said Stanley, "next week." He placed the gloves in Kyle's open hand. "Stay safe, darling."

"Stay safe?" Kyle spat. "Oh, I'll keep safe." He took the gloves and, scowling, whipped them across Stanley's face.

It wasn't excruciating—the barest, lightest sting, more a shock than a pain, though it did, in its own way, rather hurt.

"I can take care of myself, you see." Kyle was folding the gloves up and putting them into the pockets of his coat. "Love you, dearest, see you next week!" It came out drenched in sorrow, bitter and mournful. If something were to happen to Kyle, Stanley knew, a slap on the nose with purple gloves was hardly prime defense.

But Stanley staggered back to the couch with a hand on his cheek, to Gary's shocked expression. "What in heaven?" he asked. "Jeez, Stan, what was that?"

"I think he's jealous," Stanley said, sitting down. "That's all."

"Well, of what?".

"Probably you," Stanley confessed, "because you're young and blond and—so on, and he's ... well, you've met him, now, you know."

"Forget about me, where did _you_ meet _him_?"

"Oxford, actually."

"Oxford!" Gary seemed legitimately shocked. He put a hand to his cheek, as if in a pantomime. "He went to Oxford? I thought he was a prostitute! All that advertising talk about products wasn't euphemism?"

It was difficult not to laugh, at least briefly. "Oh, no," said Stanley, "hardly, never, not even close. Kyle would faint if he heard you say it, you know, he would shrivel up and die. His mother is a member of Parliament—he really is in advertising. We all did our own research project on a great British author; I did Waugh, for what it's worth. Kyle was a William Blake aficionado. He could have been a scholar, really. But, he didn't want that. So he left uni, and I followed him."

"What'd he leave it for? A guy?"

"No," said Stanley, "money."

"Then isn't he sort of one?"

"One what?"

"A prostitute," said Gary. "I mean..." His expression fell. "Oh, I was joking. Isn't that cruel of me?"

"Maybe so," Stanley admitted, though he liked it. "But who's to say prostitutes haven't gone to Oxford?"

"I'm sure some have!" Gary said. "But, Stan, come on, most probably haven't gone anywhere."

"Probably," Stanley agreed, though he was thinking of how furious Kyle would be at the suggestion. And yet—-didn't Gary have a point? Kyle had declined to read for the master's, hadn't he? Hadn't he chosen to go to work instead? And what was Stanley doing with his father's money, anyway? "Well," Stanley concluded, "we must all trade _something_ for sustenance."

"Jeez," said Gary, "that's a dismal way to think about it. Really tough."

"Pragmatic," Stanley told him, and they left it at that.

* * *

 **II.**

Normal, healthy friendships did not present themselves to Stanley so easily. Invariably, things became disrupted, mutated by sex. Something, perhaps the Catholic upbringing, had trained Stanley to assign blame to himself in each case. It wasn't quite clear who'd spoiled things between him and his friend Wendy, though. She'd always enjoyed hearing about the sex he had, and that wasn't really a crime, though it put things between them in an odd way; but he'd told her everything, which was understandably worse. Human curiosity about other people's sensual selves was a natural fact; it took a real blabbermouth to want to share. Then she'd married his boyfriend, which didn't make anything easier; a smarter man would have dropped the friendship, as Stanley had wanted to, but he was weak, or maybe just lonely. Or was loneliness a sign of weakness? Or way it the other was round? Relations between them had thawed and cooled, then thawed, then cooled.

Then there was the gift of the swim club membership—well, things seemed to be thawing again, didn't they?

"He asked me to take him to Sunday mass," Stanley explained to her, having already established that he'd had a boy living with him, and how they'd met in the first place. "Well, you can imagine I didn't really _want to_ , but it's this curiosity in him I suppose, which one has to admire, though I'm still not clear on the entire 'Mormon' thing." Stanley made little inverted commas around it with his fingers, to place a barrier between himself and the very concept, as if the word had a potency that might infect him. "He says it's very 'Mormon' to want to experience other religions. But I don't quite know what it means to be 'Mormon' in an adjectival sense, other than that one adheres to the strictures of 'Mormon'-ism."

Wendy was leaning over her teacup, hands clasped around it rudely, very non-U, a little ridge of rebellion visible when the tide of her upbringing went out. "I imagine it's something like being Catholic but not adhering to those strictures, or being Jewish—"

"Or being Anglican," Stanley suggested.

"Well, we both know the Church of England doesn't really stand for anything," she said. "Just don't tell my mother I said it."

They were sitting in the kitchen of her great Georgian townhouse, though it was hers only in the most euphemistic way; it was properly her husband's, and then, somewhat more properly, his family's. In the most accurate possible construction such a townhouse truly belonged to a theoretical heir, and likewise his descendants, but Wendy and Token hadn't any of those, and none were at present anticipated, much to Wendy's cycle of relief and chagrin. In unspoken custom, Stanley knew, the house had only recently come into the family's possession, recent in this case being the last century or, generously, two; and so it was not actually theirs, really, at all. More accurately the house on Berkeley Square belonged to the ages, or something; maybe the _idea_ of England was in fact the landlord.

Tea at Wendy's: she could no more divorce Token and retain the house than she could convince him to sell it and buy a chateau in the south of France, as certain of her friends had done. (No sale required, fortunately, though their countryside manors would inevitably welcome a pre-booked busload of parboiled tourists every afternoon for the duration of the August holidays.)

The kitchen, of course, was hardly the grandest room; Wendy's in-laws had gotten it redone in the immediate postwar of her husband's infancy, and in keeping it was all chrome a bit dented and laminate a bit peeling. It was no small sign of intimacy, Stanley knew, that he was invited into the worst part of the house.

"I certainly don't mind if you tell my mother how I feel about Catholicism"—which he had, repeatedly, to her great dismay. "I knew every word of that damn service—the old version, the new version. Every word. And of course one can't help but recite all of it, get on one's knees when required—"

"But you certainly don't mind doing _that_."

"—one wants to put it all out of mind. Here is what I admire about this Gary—he left his home in an attempt to better himself. Isn't that a lovely idea?"

"Well, I don't see you milling about Oxford, do I?"

"It's a bit different, crossing an ocean." Stanley paused. "Just a bit. We sat in the farthest pew when we went to mass—the back row, as it were. To watch the performance of it all. I could feel everyone's judgment on me, least of all Christ's. I think he would have liked a closer look, but I couldn't bear it, I absolutely had to sit as near to the exit as possible, away from any prying eyes. They certainly make it feel like they _know_ , don't they? I feel like such a bloodsucker."

"Something-sucker, anyway."

Stanley grinned. "Maybe that's why they call us poofs."

"Why's that?"

"Because everyone else wishes we'd just." He made a wide spray of his fingers and blew out a dramatic gust of air.

She made a soft sound, an _mph_ , not terribly amused by it. "Well," she said, in an attempt to redirect the conversation, "I have always liked the idea of you with a little blond boy."

"He's not little, darling, he's regular-sized."

"Is he? Everywhere?"

"I haven't checked everywhere. We've not—I'm not sure it's one of _those_."

"Oh, really," she said, not asking so much as registering boredom. "I thought that was the point."

"No," said Stanley. "The point is to be friendly."

" _Oh_ , is _that_ the point?"

"It's unkind to make fun."

"I don't need to manufacture fun, Stanley, when you're the very embodiment of it."

"He needs guidance."

"In what, though, precisely—references to Evelyn Waugh in Beaton's diaries?"

"Well, were he to inquire, I would obviously direct him to the correct shelf. But I think the canon is the least of his worries. The thing Gary needs help with is how to be an outcast."

"Ah," she said, shaking her thick, dark hair, as if to indicate they were sharing a private joke at the topic's expense—though some part of her, Stanley presumed, had to know that they were not. "I thought being an outcast was a sort of self-evident state, party to the condition that one has regrettably been ... cast out."

She must know, Stanley felt, that it wasn't so simple. "I suppose that's how one becomes outcast," he admitted, "but I mean the particular question of how one is to subsist in the city _as_ an outcast. He knows nothing, Wendy. He's never been out of Utah before—or maybe it's Colorado, I keep mixing them up. Are they even next to each other? You know it's not straightforward. They'll eat him alive."

"Probably. One hopes. You'll show him all the bars, I presume?"

In fact, Stanley had shown Gary a cottage the previous afternoon, a sight at which he'd mostly recoiled. A good-looking businessman had slipped into the furthest stall, and Stanley had taken a half-step toward it and then realized, well, now may not be the ideal time for all that. Just reflexes, was all.

"It's awful," had been Gary's final verdict. He couldn't even anoint it with his typical, "That's so interesting!" And Stanley agreed, he supposed, that it _wasn't_ very interesting. It was essential, was what it was. It was a lifeline. Curios were interesting. Certain European accents were interesting. Interesting things, Stanley felt, were the sorts of situations and ideas about which one would say, "Hm." They didn't have to be new, he felt. But sex, Stanley felt, good sex—coronary-inducing, scarcely legal, semi-public, in a _toilet_ —well, it went a bit beyond _hm_ for him.

Perhaps irked by the fact that, instead of answering, Stanley had stared gloomily into his cup of Westminster Afternoon Black, she cleared her throat and said, "Does he like London?"

"He thinks it's 'interesting,' " said Stanley, whose attention had been diverted by wondering if it wouldn't be rude to ask if he could leave with the leftover coronation chicken sandwiches. Now it was beginning to occur to him that perhaps Gary did _not_ like London, or at least, perhaps he didn't care for Stanley's slice of it, his particular vein. The image of a ripened hunk of cheese began to manifest in Stanley's imagination: the veins were the delicious parts, he assured himself. Acquired tastes, to be sure. Kyle ate Stilton with pears, but if Stanley bought cheese he ate little bits of it on its lonesome, nothing to mediate the twang of sour mold.

"I've taken him to most of my haunts," he continued, rattling some off. "At this rate I hope he becomes bored soon, because the razor-thin economy of my current experience wasn't meant to accommodate any tourists. I suppose walking's always free."

"You could get a job, you know."

He boggled at her. "Why is everyone always asking me that? I mean, what if _you_ had a job?"

"Don't ask perfectly stupid questions."

"If I had a job I wouldn't be so free to come over and alert you to the state of my personal life."

"Well," she said, ignoring that. "I'd love to meet him."

This, Stanley could arrange: "Butters' last show is in August."

"Miss B!" Wendy exclaimed. "Last show?"

"Getting out of the performance business," Stanley explained. "I told you she's opening a bookshop? Or maybe it opened, I haven't checked in."

"No, you haven't, my dear, you've just been going on about this Gary—which is fine, by the way, anything to spare me another week of hearing about Kyle."

"Don't get me started on Kyle! He's running up my bar tab—and he smacked me across the face with a pair of gloves. I can't believe I haven't mentioned it."

"Well, don't start now. Butters retiring—it's a pity I won't be here. I haven't seen him perform in—well, a long time, really. I would have loved to go."

"Yeah? Where are you going instead?"

"Saint-Tropez, in fact." Wendy paused, waiting for Stanley to inquire. After a moment, when she was certain he would not, she continued: "The McHughs have moved house," coinciding with Stanley's delayed reaction of, "Oh, how nice for you."

"Are you begrudging me an August holiday?"

"Holiday from what?"

She rolled her eyes so hard Stanley could easily imagine them separating from her sockets and falling onto her cake plate, beside the half-eaten lemony petit fours shellacked with sweating fondant. "This is what I get for telling you to get a job? Well, all right, let me address it. It's no holiday, is it, dressing for dinner every night? Waiting for PM to show her bloody face before a person can eat lunch? Your friend"—she meant her husband—"plans to run off to Monte Carlo with Jason, and then what? Guests revolving in and out, having the same conversation with everyone. And it's been boiling here, it's so hot my mother's lawn is yellow, the entire estate was like hay when we went down there—one is supposed to go to the south of France to _escape_ the British summer. For all I know we'll be sweating in our tiaras like trussed pheasants. Relaxing, that. Some vacation. All those _questions_ , you know the ones I mean. Playing tennis in the sun all hours of the day. Being made to translate everything because I'm oh-so-good with _fransay_ , you know. Doesn't that sound nice to you? I really can't stand being _trapped_ with these people."

Having listened patiently, all Stanley could muster was, "I thought she was your friend?"

Wendy sniffed. " _She_ is." Using her fork, she loosened a corner from the petit four she hadn't yet touched, and the tines became slicked with glistening, blood-red jelly. "Bebe and her squealing children—it rather makes one's skin crawl, doesn't it? She's a little silly, you know, but she's a good person, Stanley. She _understands_."

What is there to understand? he wondered. "Well," he said, "I suppose that doesn't sound terribly relaxing, in fact."

"Friendship," she said, conclusively, as she leaned over the table to peer deeply into his eyes. "It's a joy and a burden."

* * *

In the thick of Stanley's desperation, the calendar flipped to August 1. He breathed a sigh of relief. Reliable Randy, a man you could count on in just about every respect, to be a complete wanker in particular but to follow through on his commitments in the end. Stanley supposed that was the scholar in him: In the rather shapeless lifestyle of the employable academic one had to be strict about his own schedule in order to succeed. He was a drunken mess, Stanley's father, but he'd mastered the art of being a stickler. It had its advantages, Stanley thought, as he marched up to the window on Monday the second and withdrew his monthly allotment.

It came in a wad of twenty-pound banknotes, and though the pile of actual money felt reassuringly substantial in his hand, it wasn't so much when he thought about it. He did this monthly, meting out what he'd need for electricity and what he'd need for gas, what he'd need to feed himself and what he'd need to settle the tab at the Bucky. Best do that first, he told himself; no, best do that when he met Kyle later. What would be left over?

Back at the flat, Gary had borrowed Stanley's beloved typewriter—it had borne the brunt of his frustrations since schooldays, but something softened in Stanley when he saw Gary soothing the keys into composition. He was not typing hard and brusque, pouring grief he could no longer bear to contain into the plain nonjudgment of pure white A4 paper, befuddling it with tacky ink and a heavy heart. There was fluidity when Gary typed, grace bestowed in every stroke. It made Stanley want to write something again, and for a moment the ghost of an idea seemed to settle next to him—and then it was gone.

"Thanks for letting me use it," Gary said, stumbling up from the table and nearly knocking over his mug of tea. "I'm writing—I'm writing a letter to my mother," he admitted, yanking it from the machine, folding it sloppily. "I should write it by hand, huh, shouldn't I? That would be more personal."

"I find I have a difficult time putting words to paper without a typewriter," Stanley told him. "You could type it and then copy it by hand."

"Isn't that disingenuous?"

Stanley shrugged. "They're still your words."

"Yeah, I know. But it would be passing off one thing as something else. And I'm sick of doing that! That's the whole thing I've been trying to get away from."

Getting up again, Stanley checked the pocket of his jeans for his money—yes, still there. What time was it? He had ... all right, yes, plenty of time to spend, according to the clock on the wall. "Let's go for a walk," he said. Why did he have a clock at all? His only regular appointment was with someone who hadn't been on time to anything in a decade.

"I could use a walk." Gary stood and leaned over the typewriter, then turned toward the door—and then he arched back toward the leaf pinched in the maw of the device.

"I won't read it," Stanley promised.

He wouldn't—he could easily guess what such a letter likely said.

* * *

"I'm trying to tell her," Gary said, as soon as they were out of the Old Street roundabout and heading up the City Road.

"And are you trying not to shock her?"

"No," Gary clarified, "she knows that. She knows why I'm on this mission, or—maybe she's heard by now that I quit it altogether, I don't know. She knows I'm struggling." He sighed, looking upward and blinking his narrow, expressive eyes. People made too much fuss over eyes, Stanley felt. They were just devices for transmitting information to the brain. Not like other things, with actual functions, things that the brain transmitted information _to_.

Gary continued, "It's that I don't want to struggle any more. That I just want to be like this, that I think that's—it's the right thing to do. It's not me, though, it's—I have to bear this testimony."

Something about that resonated very deeply with Stanley. "Yes," he said, instantly feeling like saying merely _yes_ to this idea was inadequate to convey how very much he related to the impulse.

"Some holy little voice says not to fight it. How entirely wild, right? Every Bible story has a voice telling the prophet or the recipient of the testimony to struggle, to resist, to be better. But I'm not better, am I? I'm a quitter, right, if I don't want to struggle?"

It amazed Stanley how deeply he felt this, and while he did not believe in god, or in anything—political systems, he felt, had failed him; the family was a myth; personal character, as a concept, a rotten foundation upon which to build any structure, for one could never see decay, the structural weaknesses, until he was buried in debris—some perfectly idiotic little idea bubbled up from somewhere in his torso, through his brain, and past his lips: "It's a struggle _not_ to resist."

Somehow, despite the irrelevance of it, the notion seemed to hang between them for a few minutes, as they continued walking in relative silence.

Until, eventually, Gary stopped on the pavement, said, "Oh!"

At first Stanley presumed it was a delayed reaction to Stanley's last observation. Next to him, tied to a peeling lamppost, a SAVE THE CITY ROAD BASIN sign, weather-beaten, flapped against worn iron. Stanley could imagine the noise the sign _should_ make, the flack of paper on metal, but he could not hear it.

"They're trying to fill in the canal, you know," he said, casually, as if he hadn't just moments ago given Gary some iconoclastic advice. Gary clearly hadn't noticed the sign. "There's a woman, I don't know her name, trying to keep it open for boating. She met with Kyle's mother recently. I don't follow politics."

"I voted for Nixon both times."

"He's the one who left, isn't he?" Stanley asked, knowing very well that he was, and not waiting for an answer: "Do you regret it?"

"I don't think so," said Gary. "He wasn't an honest man, I guess, in the end. It was pretty sad for America. But the other choices weren't so good. And we didn't know that at the time. I'd vote for him again, I guess, if the circumstances were the same. They weren't quite fair to him, though I guess he wasn't quite the person we thought he was."

Stanley sighed. "It wouldn't matter. The way Sheila told us, Kyle and myself, about that meeting—'the poor woman, it's not my district, the borough will do as it needs.' That's what she said." He continued walking.

At the juncture where the City Road met Wakley Street, were they were to turn to get to the place to which Stanley had been leading them, he stopped. "It seems to me," he said, "that most often when we turn to a higher power, we're thwarted. I do mean _we_ , all people, but mostly we— _us_. And going along, it's not without its challenges. I have friends who go along. I _know_ those people, if you get me. I've had them. But it isn't _that_ hard, is it, to conform? To be like everyone else is? The tools are all there, aren't they? How much harder to just ... not."

"I hadn't thought of it," said Gary, his eyes wide. "That's so interesting. I really mean it—or maybe I still shouldn't use that word so much. But it _is_ interesting. I just hadn't considered. I really don't know _how_ it would be to not—to not try."

Stanley nodded. "We're going to St. Andrew's Gardens, via Sidmouth Street," he said, turning left and departing the main road.

* * *

Whatever romance Stanley had once felt for summer, it had been burnt away over the course of that year's, which the papers had called a "scorcher" and "hotter than Honolulu." No one Stanley knew had ever been to Honolulu, although Kyle did have the occasional taste for a tiki drink, and Stanley had spent more than a few of the past decade's evenings watching Kyle mai-tai himself up in a stupor at Trader Vic's. Hawaii seemed impossibly far away, and comfortably warm rather than blistering. There had been so many pictures in the tabloids of bare-arsed and swim-costumed children frolicking on the seaside beaches, and while Kyle had gone to New York to see the tall ships and visit his extended family, Stanley had gone to Margate with a trick who'd woken up still a bit high and suggested they let the channel saltwater wash the sweat from their limbs as they came down.

In the insufferable swelter of afternoon sun, Stanley had submerged his head. When he came up, he saw the current had washed away the sultry glamor of the night before, leaving a pork pie of a man with skin like suet and sclerae like the jelly trapped between the meat and the pastry. It was so hot that the cold shock of raising one's head from the water never came. They swam out quite far and when Stanley could just barely stand and the pork pie was treading water, they beat each other off, knees and toes knocking together in a total hazard.

"Thanks," said Stanley, "and bye." He swam back to shore, his heart beating with the thrill of illegality. He was sober and nearly stepped on several sun-bonneted babies while stumbling back to his pile of clothing.

("Those masts were ramrod tall," Kyle bragged, returning in mid-July. "We saw all of them from the docks.")

On the other side of that long summer, it seemed odd to perspire in Sidmouth Street, across from the office-row that, in Stanley's memory, only existed in winter, branches bare, doorknob chilling his fingers, gloved or not. Once, he had wondered what kind of place this street might be; now, he knew, that it looked like what it was: cruel uniformity.

"That one," Stanley said, pausing near enough to indicate the façade and far enough, he prayed, not to be spotted through the window. "I went to a clinic on the second floor of that building every week for two years."

"For what?" Gary asked, as Stanley had known he was going to.

"Let's go to the gardens, find a bench, and I'll tell you."

At least I've still got my dramatic flair, Stanley thought to himself all the way back to the end of the block, across the street, and down Gray's Inn Road again. That's it, Stanley thought, that's the bit they couldn't kill—my love of drama. He thought of Kyle's purple gloves, Butters' immaculate full face of slap, the way some men had used to preen over their shoulders when Stanley approached the bar on a Saturday night and asked for a piss-cheap pull of anything on draft, or a liter of offensively sweet wine.

 _Everything that's ever happened to me is part of a story I'm telling myself about the person I am and what's going to happen to me next_ , he thought, indicating that Gary should sit on a badly kept bench across a path from a rotting tomb that towered above their seated heads.

"I used to come here after the clinic," Stanley said casually. "I'd confess, effectively, all the men I'd encountered in deliberate error over the past week, accidentally on purpose. Maybe they'd ask me why I'd done it, or how I felt—I couldn't help it, I'd say, or I'd tell them I felt bad. I did feel bad, is the sick thing. Certainly I couldn't help it. I went into it unwilling to _try_ to be converted. Maybe I could have stopped if I'd wanted to, but I didn't."

"Oh, Stan," said Gary. It came out heavy. "Why didn't you?"

"Because it was pointless. Nobody wants to be this way, clearly. How much easier not to be, as we've discussed. It was at my father's suggestion; he thought it might help. It's pseudoscience, clearly, so he ought not to have believed it. Mostly I'd just talk, but sometimes they'd shock me."

At this, Gary reeled back and, at the same time, grabbed Stanley's arm. "With _electricity_?" he gasped.

"Ironically, it's quite interesting, isn't it?"

It took a few moments of uncomfortable silence for Gary to conjure up something to say to this: "It didn't work, clearly!"

"Of course it didn't." With a flourish of his hands, Stanley stood up. "I'd come and sit on this bench, trembling. I shared a flat with Kyle at the time, and I'd think, how can I do back to him like this? Sometimes I'd have to carry a kerchief of a rag or something so I wouldn't chip my teeth. Sometimes I'd forget to bring something, but I always had a paperback on me. Sometimes I'd bite down on the book and think, well, of course I read English, I always knew I had a taste for books."

"That's crazy!" Gary got up, too, and Stanley saw that Gary was beginning to look around, taking in, for the first time, where they were. "Is this a graveyard?"

Matter of factly, Stanley said, "Oh, naturally. Though I'm sure it hasn't been in use for some time. I don't even think about the dead, you know."

"Oh, heck, buddy. You've been through the wringer, haven't you?"

"Me? No, I don't think so—I haven't, really. Kyle has, for example. You could only imagine."

"I'm sure I could, but I don't want to. It's not a contest."

"Oh, but of course it's a contest! That is, in fact, the grim truth at the core of these things. Love, sex, time, wealth—they are all so limited. The only thing that's ever been distributed in my life with any sort of equity is medical attention, but the wealthy all have private surgeons anyhow."

"Yeah," Gary said. He sounded so sad. Stanley put a hand on his shoulder—just for a moment. Just a reassuring brush, a transgression as minute and fleeting as it was monumental. Gary was blushing as Stanley withdrew his hand. "Well, I suppose that's—well, there's no other word for it. It's interesting. It's just about as sorry a state of affairs as it is an interesting intellectual concept. But I've been thinking about what Kyle said, anyway."

"Oh? You really shouldn't."

"Aw, don't make fun of the guy. I thought you said he'd had it rough?"

Strange, Stanley thought, that Gary would be the one defending Kyle, after his rudeness, his frivolity, his storming out. He must have the patience of a saint—meaning Gary, not Kyle. What a good person. What a very good and very wholesome person. You don't meet people like that very often. How did I come to meet this person? Gary's eyes were locked on Stanley's—well, that was uncomfortable. Stanley looked, instead, at the soft square of his chin, lightly stubbled, which it hadn't been until now. Thin lips, light hair at the top of his T-shirt. Only for a moment, Stanley thought, I wonder who will be the first person to kiss this wonderful man? Of course I'm not going to do it. If we'd met some other way, perhaps.

"What were you thinking about?"

"His point about people not believing our story. I know it should feel bad, I mean, I know what Kyle meant. The truth is, Mormons were persecuted in America for a while, until we made it to Utah thanks to the bravery of our pioneers. They risked everything to make a homeland. They were chased out of everywhere because our story wasn't suited to American tastes. Doesn't that sound a little basic? I mean with pitchforks and torches. Like in _Young Frankenstein_."

"I haven't seen it," said Stanley.

"We should see it one day, if it plays here! It's very funny. Um. I think the Mormon will is to just persist. And it's possible—crossing the plains, heading for Utah—it's possible because we know. We just know, maybe stupidly, that we're right."

"Right about what?"

"All of it," said Gary, and his face lit up. "Joseph Smith's testament, how God wants us to live, the end of days. And the worst thing a person can do, Stan, is know it's right and turn away from that." In a split second, Gary's expression dimmed, and he sighed. "What Kyle said—next time I see him I should tell him, it doesn't bother me what he said because I know he's wrong. I'm right and he's wrong."

"Yes, that's the kind of thing that _would_ really bother him."

"Oh. If it would, maybe I won't say it."

"It wouldn't stop him from saying it to you, though. Maybe I shouldn't have introduced you."

"No, Stan, it was—I'm glad you did. He's important to you. I wanted to meet him."

That's not why I introduced you, though, Stanley thought to himself. I did it because Kyle demanded it.

"What do you like about being Mormon?" Stanley asked, to deflect attention from the fact that he'd left Gary's statement hanging.

"Oh! What an interesting question. I've never thought about it, of course. I just always have been. So whether I like it or not hasn't mattered so much. I guess, a lot of the things that I love and care about are a part of being Mormon. Like, my family. I just really love my family." Gary closed his eyes. "And they love me, I think. No, I know they do. My mother does. I'm gonna—I have to send her that letter."

"But you'd have your family if you weren't Mormon, I presume."

"I don't know! Of course, I want to think so. But I've never _not_ been in the Church. I can't imagine what I'd think then, I'd—I can't even imagine it."

"Well, you're the first Mormon I've met, and the vast majority of those whose acquaintance I've made have had a family as well. If you're willing to accept a wholly unscientific if nevertheless fully observed sample."

"Yeah." Gary sighed. "But it wouldn't be the same, Stan. You gotta trust me—I think you'd have to be LDS to know. I mean, weirdly, it's _because_ we're Mormon that I think maybe my family's gonna have to accept it, even if they don't like it. I'm not gonna end up spending eternity with anyone, so you have to figure, I'd better cram it all in now. Maybe I should put that, in the letter. What do you think?"

"I think it's really up to you, seeing as you know them best."

"I really did want to spend my eternity with _someone_ ," said Gary. "Is it true that gays can't have monogamy?"

Stanley was shocked that the question didn't come sooner. "I've only had one boyfriend. And it didn't work out with him, clearly. So, I don't know."

"What didn't work out?"

"Actually, what didn't work out in particular was the fact that he wished to go off and marry a woman," said Stanley. "So, you know, that complicates things, doesn't it?"

"Don't most men marry women?"

"That is generally how it works," Stanley agreed. "And yet, being gay, I had really presumed otherwise. That was nearly a decade ago, so maybe I ought not think about it so much—they're still my friends, the husband and wife. And I still have sex, sometimes, with my ex. The whole thing's a bit of a muddle, really. A fine mess." Gary did not say anything immediately in reply, so Stanley added: "On a purely theoretical level I do think I'm capable of monogamy; I suspect that if it were asked of me I could do it. But I don't know that _I_ would ask for it."

"I really want that," said Gary. "The idea of being with a lot at once—when people talk about it, it feels so tough. I want someone I can have a spiritual bond with, you know? We have this concept of being sealed, and it's forever. I feel like forever might sound pretty scary, but maybe not if you've got another person to face it with. I keep hoping that maybe God doesn't want me to be alone for eternity. Then I think, well, maybe he can't give me someone for eternity. But maybe he can give me someone for now? On _this_ planet? If I'm not gonna—if I can't—" Abruptly, he cut himself off. "I don't want to be in hell in _this_ life. I want someone in it with me."

"Well, that's the idea, isn't it? But the nice thing about being like _this_ , if you view it with a bit of distortion, is that there's no need to limit yourself to one person. If you find that spiritual bond, kudos to you, but maybe if you truly _are_ kin the fidelity becomes mere pretense. The marrieds I know, they haven't exactly limited themselves. It's not important what you do with your body out there." Stanley gesticulated widely, sweeping his open palms across the expanse of monuments consumed by unkempt wildflower growth. "The important bit is where one lays his head at night."

Gary made a disapproving noise.

Stanley was unable to offer anything else.

"So that wasn't Kyle, that boyfriend?"

"No," said Stanley, trying to sound firm. "He's never been my boyfriend. It's been _something_ , all right. It's never been that."

"Is that what you wish for?"

Stanley considered that. He had once, yes, and he wasn't sure why it hadn't happened. It ought to have, he felt; it wasn't so much that they slept together (for Stanley had slept with a truly startling number of people) as that they'd lived together, confided in each other, complemented each other's gaps to form one particularly streamlined unit. They'd only stopped living together—dreaming up the grocery list, making runs to the off-license, insinuating themselves amongst each other's families by becoming regular plus-ones for birthday cake—because Kyle had begun to worry that, to his colleagues, living with another single man looked distasteful.

"They don't care if I'm a bit musical," he'd said, being camp about it. "But I ought to act ashamed of it, you know?" Stanley knew. He went out and bought a flat. And Kyle had gotten one, too. It always felt like they'd been meant to be together—but now that way was sealed shut.

But otherwise, what did Stanley wish? He'd published two novels and, having run out of stories to tell, had become a property owner. With the avenues of marriage and children unmarked on his map, what else was there? Just live until you die, he told himself sometimes, when he was feeling bad about some catty remark or being told off by a date, or his father calling him dreadful things, or his sister's children asking him why their mother said he was going to hell.

"I rather wish life weren't so bloody long and so bloody difficult," said Stanley. "It's the worst thing, isn't it? Being alive."

"I don't know about that," said Gary. "I think life is mostly pretty beautiful. God made it like this for us, you know? Even the bad parts."

Someone's going to get quite lucky indeed, Stanley thought, when this wonderful man falls in love with them.

And so Stanley got a crazy idea: "A friend of ours—Kyle's and mine, specifically—is a female impersonator, and he's been doing performances fairly regularly the entire time we're known him. But he's retiring now, because he'll be thirty next month and he thinks thirty is too old to remain in the female impersonation business."

"Oh. That's really interesting. I'd never really thought about how old was too old to do that! Not that I—not that I know what it's like, really. Do you think thirty's too old?"

"I don't suppose it matters. _He_ thinks it is."

"Is it mostly something young guys do?"

"I think increasingly not, no. It's not exactly in fashion now to be a female impersonator—doing drag, you'd also call it. He's got a whole act, singing songs, making his own outfits. His stage name is Butters Stotch. We call him 'Miss B' sometimes, Kyle and I."

"Oh," said Gary, "that's funny—like butterscotch."

"We started calling him that at uni because he got fucked so much his arse was constantly loose."

"Oh, wow." Gary grinned, despite himself. "I can't imagine."

"She's precocious, Miss B. Anyway, no, that whole thing, drag and camping and ladying round like a grand dame, queening it up, whatever you'd call it—it's not _quite_ à la mode. I think that's part of why Butters is quitting. Plus he's tired. He's got an MPhil from Birkbeck recently and he just opened an antiquarian bookshop. What else?"

"Have you, um. Been with that guy?"

"Oh, yes, absolutely," said Stanley. "Just not for many years. Do you want to go with me? To his final show, I mean."

"Will there be other homosexuals there?"

"Exclusively, I should think."

"I wonder what it's like to be around a lot of them. Or—us, I suppose."

"Come with me," said Stanley. "Then you'll see."

"All right." Gary clasped his hands together. "All right, I think I will. Thanks for the invitation."

It came out a bit arch: "Don't quite thank me yet."

* * *

The show was at a little cabaret in Soho, the first place Butters had performed in London. Though he'd managed to work his way around the circuit, somewhat—handing out cigarettes at parties or doing a brief set around the candlelit smoke at an illegal nightclub—he always had a sentimental spot for his second home in London. Stanley felt sorry for him, in some ways; to lose one's profession due to age seemed rather unfair, and somewhat random. Turning thirty-one in the fall himself, Stanley thought all the way back to a year previous and couldn't quite recall that he'd had any feelings on it whatsoever. His life at twenty-nine was no different than his life would be at thirty-one, and the just-shy of two years between those figures had stretched out with few discernible marks or features, neither changes to his outlook nor diminishments of his abilities, nor memorable events, nor lines around his face that hadn't been there before. At least, as he looked at himself every day at least once, it may have been hard to notice. Butters did seem tired, Stanley allowed, but he'd been pursuing a degree alongside all of this, not to mention buying and remodeling a bookshop with an independent business loan. Maybe that was what tired people out—all of that doing. Owing things to people. Still, in some sense it felt to Stanley as if those things would only age a person out if he let it.

Perhaps Butters' trouble was that he'd let it.

For the performance, Stanley lent Gary one of his T-shirts, a plain white one, and advised him to wear a pair of jeans.

"Where am I gonna find a pair of jeans?" Gary asked, and it occurred to Stanley that he'd been wearing the same pair of old-fashioned black slacks the whole time.

"Maybe a charity shop," Stanley suggested, unsure what kind of money Gary had but fairly certain he himself didn't owe Gary much at this point, let alone clothing—beyond the shirt he was already contributing to the cause, that was.

Still, Stanley found himself going down with Gary down the Columbia Road and offering to pay for a pair of jeans.

"You really don't have to, Stan! You've done so much already. Just tell me what looks good?"

Despite the fact that they'd been living together for weeks, it was, somehow, the first time Stanley had really seen Gary's legs, his thighs, his arse: athletic-shapely, a bit thicker than Stanley might have expected, in keeping with the current ideal and probably ill-suited to the slicked-on cigarette slacks gay boys were wearing around the time Stanley had started sleeping with them.

"I've never worn anything so tight in my life," said Gary. He then blushed, hands falling to his sides. "Well, maybe baseball pants." He paused. "Basketball shorts." Another pause. "When I say pants I literally mean, you know, long ones, like slacks. Not underwear." With one bare foot he kicked at the cuff of his other leg, which flared out just slightly.

"You'll fit right in," Stanley assured him, though he knew this would only extend so far as the outfit.

* * *

For Stanley, it was difficult to imagine a gay venue that wasn't underground. It was only as he was leading Gary across Soho Square on a rainy mid-August night that Stanley realized, well, the Duke of Buckingham is aboveground, isn't it? But then, that wasn't purpose-built so much as adopted. And yet, wasn't that the case with every queer haunt? No one built things for them specifically.

"They should," Stanley could imagine Kyle saying, for he was always thinking of new markets and how to squeeze the hard-earned cash out of them. "And you the son of a great Labour minister," Stanley would chide, and then Kyle would say, "Well, dear, that's why we have a social safety net. There but for the grace of the welfare state go I."

When they arrived at the club, though, Kyle was already in a state.

"I found us seats in the front," he explained, dragging Stanley by the arm. "I know you like to go on about me being consistently late, but if I couldn't get a prime place for this evening I would have absolutely died."

"So who's sitting there now, while you've been waiting for us by the door?"

" _Us_ ," Kyle repeated, not sparing a glance at Gary, who was behind Stanley, a neutral look on his face. "The usual suspects, of course. Our coterie, as it were."

Turning to look at Gary, Stanley said, "Brace yourself."

"There's a lot going on here! It's, uh. Well, I'd better not say it."

"Definitely don't say it to Eric," Kyle advised. "My god, he'll eat you alive."

"Who?"

"Just, friends of ours," said Stanley. "Ours and Butters'."

"Ghastly person," said Kyle. "Try not to look him directly in the eyes."

"Will he turn me to stone?"

Kyle scoffed. "Quite the opposite. You'll be lucky if he doesn't put you off sex permanently."

But Eric wasn't such a bad-looking man, merely a somewhat larger one. He sat with his arms crossed over his chest, lording over the entr'acte. He had grown sideburns, Stanley noticed—when had that happened? They must have seen each other over the summer—Stanley began to count back the months: he'd seen Wendy here and met Butters at the bookshop there; Kyle had come back from New York and they had gone out together, the night before Gary had come knocking on his door; Kyle had been overseas visiting his relations and then before that...what? Before that, what? Gaping at Eric's absurdly coifed grown-out hair, Stanley realized that he could not remember what he had done with his summer and, indeed, the last time he had seen Eric, and that, more to the point, he had not immediately noticed that Bradley was sitting next to Eric, waving hello meekly—

"Rude," Eric said, standing up and pushing Stanley aside. "What's this?"

"I'm Gary."

"Oh god," Eric croaked. "Another American."

"Another?" Gary asked. "Er, I think I missed the first one. We haven't met. I'm Gary." He extended a hand.

Eric appeared nonplused. "Yes, you said."

Then Bradley stood up and said, "It's so lovely to meet you," taking the hand that Eric hadn't managed to connect with. "Are you here for the show?"

"I suppose," said Gary. "I'm sorry, and you are?—"

"I can't believe you brought him," Kyle hissed over Stanley's shoulder.

"He wanted to meet, you know, homos." Stanley could hear how very flimsy it sounded, but he could not shake the feeling that perhaps he had made a mistake.

Kyle clipped off the end of each of his words: "Meet one indeed. In the strictest sense only. A regular symposium, this. Well, it's like I say, there's no better place to meet a homo than under one."

"You never say that," Stanley pointed out.

"Don't I?" Kyle rolled his eyes. "You're not with me all of the time. You don't know what it is that I say."

Something roiled in Stanley, a feeling he was unused to. His hands closed around themselves—he was holding nothing, he realized; he ought to go to the bar—

"Oh, gosh, no thank you," Gary was saying. "That's so kind, but I don't drink."

"What's wrong with you?" Eric asked.

"Oh, don't be so _domineering_ ," said Bradley. Stanley saw him put a hand on Gary's shoulder, and instantly he filled with the hyper-particular worry that it was within the realm of possibility that such a gesture, so small and so intimate, fleeting until it wasn't—they were always _looking_ , weren't they, Butters and Bradley?

Stanley had seen Gary write the address on his letter; his mother, it seemed, lived in Colorado, presumably with the rest of his family. The town was called "South Park," which surprised Stanley because there was also a South Park in Fulham, and when Stanley and Kyle had lived on the King's Road, it had been a convenient place to cottage. Then again, every place had parks, and every place had cardinal directions. It did not seem so odd, did it, that Stanley had once (or twice, or more often still) dirtied his trouser knees in the lavatory at a park named the very same thing as the town Gary had come from?

The postbox wasn't far. Mere minutes, Stanley figured. They dotted the area, caution-red pillars in elegy for the ease with which communiqués transited the imperial landscape of the Eastern hemisphere.

And so when Gary hadn't returned, and Stanley had begun to count the minutes, it seemed likely that he'd been found by his missionary comrades, or had the misfortune to run into some roughs, or—

Or what, Stanley wondered. What else could possibly have delayed him?

When the clock had counted ten minutes past the point at which Stanley had begun counting, he realized he ought to distract himself. On the bottom shelf of his bookcase there was an atlas, the _Times Atlas of the World, Midcentury Edition_. It had been gifted to him by his only uncle two decades ago, when Stanley was about to embark on his secondary education at Cheney. In the first volume there was a handwritten note: _To my nephew Stanley_ , it said, and that was all. Having not spoken to the man in several years, the idea of rereading it now seemed undesirable. _Volume V: The Americas_ slid from its place easily, and Stanley opened the book across his thighs to study the United States.

Stanley pored over the broad western expanse of a country he'd never visited. The states here were so boxy, inelegant, stacked atop one another as if some bureaucrat had simply gotten his ruler and measured out state boundaries according to a vaguely Mondrian internal logic. It was an answer to the other half of the county, where borders seemed woven into the fabric of the national topography, following rivers here and ridges there. Christ, Stanley thought, if my father saw me doing this he'd think he'd finally gotten through to me. In any case, Stanley could not find any city called South Park. There was a Denver, like the folk singer, and a Boulder and a Mesa, which could only remind Stanley of, again, his father's interests. Pressed between the pages of this twenty-year-old reference, America seemed like a big empty land of nothing.

Then Gary had come home—or back, at least—and called out, "Hey, Stan?"

And before saying, "I'm here," Stanley had snapped the atlas closed and thrust it back onto the shelf, cheeks red with guilt as if he'd been looking for something he should not have.

It was only days later, in this club, watching Bradley paw at Gary's shoulder, that Stanley came to a realization: it had been the first time that he had looked at a map of the United States and not thought, even in passing, about Kyle.

Kyle was difficult to forget when he was in the room, though. "Come on," he said, tugging on Stanley's belt loop. "Buy me a drink."

They got a bottle of inexpensive sherry, a favorite old habit, though the older Stanley became the less he cared for sweet drinks in general or sherry in particular; the older Kyle became—well, as Kyle had gotten older he'd gotten richer, too, and maybe he could have bought his own, let alone something better. But Stanley knew the request for what it was: a love note to their past, a reminder of the history that survived only as they each agreed upon its relevance to their current lives. If they parted ways—if one of them did not turn up some Monday night, if one of them chose a third man over the other, if one of them left London, if one of them died—

He did not like how it tasted, but he could never regret drinking it.

"What's that?" Gary asked, when he spied the unmarked bottle in Kyle's grasp and the half-drunk sherry in Stanley's wine glass.

"Wine." Stanley looked into his drink and then into Kyle's eyes: a look of disbelief. "You can try some, if you're curious."

Kyle complained softly, and under the soundtrack (snickering, some dried-out cant that Stanley hadn't heard lately, the pianist warming up, Butters having come to greet them before the show and saying, "Eric, no, of course it's not a wig, it's just a haircut, I'd say I was sorry you didn't like it but I don't care one whit—I agree, Brad, angel, _thank you_ ") it was impossible to make out what, exactly, Kyle had said.

Gary was giving the drink big eyes.

"It's alcohol. It does make all of this—" Stanley gestured, ceilingward, roundly, with the glass, "—just slightly more bearable."

"Oh, I think I'm bearing it." Gary winked, which was an unexpected thing to do. "Thanks, Stan."

"Thanks, Stan," Kyle repeated. He'd finished his glass of sherry and was refilling it.

"I want to be here," said Gary. "I really do!"

"No one wants to be here," Kyle scoffed. Then, at a withering look from Butters, he softened: "Miss B, darling, no offense, it's always a joy to see you—I just mean, by the time one is approaching thirty, he starts to think, how many nights will I have to spend in a basement? In this heat! There isn't even a window to open. Do you know, I was in Manhattan last month, and it seemed like everywhere was air-conditioned? God, it's not supposed to be this hot _anywhere_. Pity you, dear, having to get up on stage and perform under all those lights."

"Oh. Well, I suppose it's my luck that the whole ensemble's designed for minimal coverage." Butters took a turn in his bare feet to show off the Sally Bowles approximation he'd sewn: a black one-piece halter bodysuit, entirely backless, with the merest suggestion of legs on it. He leaned into Gary and asked, "Are you familiar with _Cabaret_?" Apparently, they'd become acquainted while he had been at the bar.

Stanley's heart leapt again, and so he asked himself, why do I care?

"Not really. I mean, I remember when it came out. "

Butters tapped out a flourish. "Still got it!" he said. "Well, you'll see. Just a bit of soft-shoe. I mean, no-shoe."

"See what?" Gary asked.

Wiping sherry from his lips to reveal a scowl, Kyle heaved a sigh and said, "She's doing songs from _Cabaret_ ," as if anyone should have known that.

"Tomorrow belongs to me," Eric said, slamming his fist on the table.

"Don't be ridiculous!"

"I want to hear it, Jewess. Butters, you promised."

"Eric, I made no promises."

"But it's the best song!"

"Don't you call me that!"

"Or what?"

Stanley had seen _Cabaret_ and enjoyed it, even but it was only as Kyle was lecturing Eric for his indecency that Stanley realized, that's right, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is a _song_ from _Cabaret_ —not something he recalled being easy to tap along with.

"I think you'll all be very pleased with the program in your own ways," said Bradley, trying to be diplomatic.

Gary leaned in to ask, "How _is_ it, _Cabaret_? You've seen it, right, Stan?"

"It's a good piece of modernist art. As a musical it's a bit, mm." He shrugged, to make the point. "The book, on the other hand—"

Butters yelped, "I have to go put my shoes on!" He all but tossed his drink at Bradley, who very narrowly managed not to drop it.

* * *

As a performer, Butters had a very modest following. Since arriving, Stanley had noticed that the room had filled up quite a bit, though the faces had changed somewhat, too; some had left after finishing the drinks they'd been nursing during the opening act, and they had mostly been replaced at the rate of one and one half men, to the point that, scanning the room, Stanley estimated that between one and two dozen had come in time to see Butters.

"My friend Eric requested this set," Butters began, leaning into the old-fashioned microphone, the brim of a bowler swinging minutely at his fingertips, near his fishnet knees. It seemed like, along with the tap shoes, he'd put on garters. "You know me, boys, I'm easy. And all of this has been in good fun. But if you happen to meet someone in your travels who's invested enough to make demands, well." He took a moment to put the hat on his head, and his hands on his hips. "I've never said no to anyone who's shown even a passing interest!"

There was some hooting at that, though it wasn't much, not like in the early days; the issue was, Stanley knew, the sun had set on a particular _kind_ of queerness. The world, it seemed, had itself grown queerer.

From underneath one of his garters, Butters pulled out a card. "I asked him to change these lyrics just a bit, and he obliged, of course: _Sie sollen mich nicht mehr sehen_. Isn't that a fine sentiment?"

Someone, and then many people, began to applaud.

"So, I've been practicing. Let's see if I can't get that extra syllable in without bunging the entire thing. Of course, I don't usually have trouble fitting more in!"

Amid some more hooting, a bit louder, someone shouted, "Front pocket!"

"Oh, that's not from _Cabaret_! If you're a good boy I'll do it for an encore."

"Tomorrow belongs to me!" Eric called out, hands cupped around his mouth.

"Oh, shush, you be patient!"

Clutching Stanley's thigh, Kyle leaned over. He was so close his lips were practically caressing the cuff of Stanley's ear.

"I really wish she hadn't let Eric pick the set list," Kyle whispered. "Beyond being insultingly offensive, this is very on-the-nose!" He meant the bit about the Nazis, of course, who in any iteration of the story had real cause to feel optimistic about their tomorrows, at least in the short term. And perhaps Kyle was thinking—as Butters queued the pianist and launched into it with, "you have to understand the way I am"—that the farewell-but-not-really of the piece was a bit literal.

Yet to Stanley it was literal in a fitting way, Eric's taste for the aesthetics of fascism aside. The topic of the movie—and of the stories in the first place—was tension between the legitimate world and the underground, of taking leave of the former for the latter, and going back again. It was, after all, _Goodbye to Berlin_ for true purpose; the cabaret singer in question did ultimately depart.

And then there was this, which stuck out to Stanley as the most interesting aspect of the matter: it would take a real scholar to pry apart the myth-making and the fictionalization of the stories from Isherwood's own life. How much of it had been distilled from historical experience into the film, like mimeographs of mimeographs, Stanley could only guess.

Inexplicably, Stanley thought of the Christian Bible, refracted through Joseph Smith into the story Gary had once told him.

" _Es war sehr gut_ ," Butters sang, " _und vorbei_."

* * *

"See," Butters continued, taking Gary by the arm and leading him to a booth in the back of the Duke of Buckingham, "I just thought it was clever, right? When I'm through, I'm through, toodle-oo!" Letting go, he waved his hands a bit. "You really have to see the movie, you know, it's just absolutely a rollicking good movie, and I'm sorry to say I've got no idea where or when it would be playing—"

"I'd love to see it," said Gary, who slid into the booth well ahead of Stanley.

"Maybe they'll revive it! I nearly died of pleasure the first time I saw Judi Dench play Sally Bowles at the Palace—but then they made a film of it, and Liza washed away anything I had in my brain about the stage version in the first place. It's pure Liza, this get-up. Do you like it? I can't even remember what Judi wore in the stage version, truth be told."

"It's two stage versions," said Stanley, "and the film besides. But the book is so much better. I mean, it's really two books, but you can buy it under one title."

"Like a reverse _Lord of the Rings_ , really," Bradley offered, pushing his way into the booth from the other side.

"Book if you can call it that," said Kyle.

"Isherwood is without parallel," Stanley insisted. It came out stiff and unremitting. He liked that. " _Down There on a Visit_ 's just as good, maybe better. _A Single Man_ —you ought to read _A Single Man_."

"What's a single man?" Gary asked.

"Desperate," said Eric.

Butters laughed. "No, dear," he said, putting a hand on Gary's shoulder. "It's a book."

"Darling," Stanley said, sharply. " _Drinks._ "

"Oh," said Kyle, "if you insist."

"I insist."

"What are we drinking?" Kyle asked. He began to feel in his pocket for coins, and Stanley looked closely at him. A hint of damp clung to his temples; as often in the summer Kyle's skin had developed an unflattering redness that reminded Stanley not of a brisk clean scrub, but more of clammy sex in their under-ventilated rooms at Magdalen, which had always tended to go on a bit too long because they had never been entirely sober enough to make it efficiently and without effectively belaboring what could have been, under other circumstances, a relatively contained distraction. Not that Kyle looked uni-aged, at thirty; mostly he seemed very tired, poking drunkenly at the fifty-p bits and what Stanley could not help but fondly remember as shillings and florins.

Looking up from his palmful of riches, Kyle said, "I presume I'm treating your child bride."

"What nonsense," said Stanley, who was at the wrong point in his transition from sobriety into its farther-flung reaches to properly place the sentiment. "He isn't a child. He doesn't drink. He isn't mine."

"All right." Kyle's fist closed around his coins. "I'm just treating you, then."

"I bought you dinner last Monday."

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did. We were here—you insisted on a horrible pie. Before you saw that solicitor—from ... Lincoln's?"

"Gray's," said Kyle. "That was weeks ago."

"A few weeks at most, maybe."

"Months, even."

"I can't believe that."

"It had to have been May, Stanley. It wasn't hot out yet."

"It doesn't matter when it was," said Stanley. He did not entirely believe it. In his memory, it had been hot out. In fact, as the conversation went on he began to wonder how that dinner could have been so very long ago, when he could picture it as clear as Kyle in front of him now: pursed-lipped, which had the unflattering effect of causing his flushed skin to gleam in the mostly broken Christmas bulbs that someone had draped over the Victorian sort of bar—had clearly strung more and more as older strands burned off without bothering to remove the originals, so that the room had not the eerie autumnal glow of a Magdalen fireplace and more the industrial half-lighting of a Woolworth's.

"It couldn't have been May," Stanley managed, through his doubts. "You were already back from New York."

"I suppose it doesn't matter," said Kyle, sneering and putting away his change. "I'll pay for you either way, if you apologize."

This seemed ludicrous to Stanley, who reflexively came out with, "I just paid off a rather hefty bar tab, and it was mostly yours!"

"If you had a proper vocation it wouldn't matter! Then I could run up your bar tab as high as I wanted."

This, above all else, somehow enraged Stanley more than anything. Perhaps it was because that, even in a noisy room, with a man's fleshy upper arm brushing against his and another's pointy loafer poking into Stanley's trainer, with the lights very low, and with the day's rocket-high heat trapped in the pub's fin de siècle plasterwork, from which it refused to fall back down to earth, it seemed that Kyle's complaint was such a small and petty one. Beyond that Kyle could pay his own tab, the logical fallacies inherent in such a concept were so extensive that to enumerate and rebut each one would have taken them squarely into a night-long diversion, and as at any pub, the Duke of Buckingham rung the bell at ten to 11.

Pushing aside the fleshy-armed man—whose white T-shirt was so thoroughly soaked with what was seemingly perspiration that his dark chest hair made foreboding streaks visible beneath it—Stanley caught the attention of the bar man.

Gesturing at Kyle with an elbow, Stanley said, "I think he's finally lost his faith."

"Yeah, and what do you want me to do about it?" the bartender slurred, from exhaustion, no distance between his words.

"Anything sweet that's expensive," which seemed for some reason to be a particularly clever thing to say.

A moment after stepping away, the bartender returned, bearing a rather suspect-looking old bottle of what, on squinting at the label, was apparently a pear calvados.

"Seems fitting," said Stanley. "All right."

"One or two?"

"Just give me the bottle."

"Cheeky," said a man with a two-day beard, who was waiting to order.

Beyond caring, Stanley pulled the wad of his ill-gotten funds from his front pocket and began to count out single-pound notes. After tendering, he grabbed the bottle and found that it had been opened for him. "Cheers," he said to the bearded man, drinking straight from the bottle.

"You'll like this," he said, wiping his mouth and foisting the calvados off on Kyle, who was loitering where Stanley had left him, behind the crush against the bar.

"Roger Groult," Kyle read, tipping the bottle back to inspect the label. "Pays d'Auge. I like the sound of it."

"Then thank me." Stanley crossed his arms, wondering how he had gotten here, wondering why he was doing this, anxious to know how Gary was getting on—

"Thank you." Kyle put his thumb over the lip of the bottle, and squashed his way between pockets of crowd to make it back to their booth.

Immediately, Eric barked at them, "Where's my stout?"

"Get it yourself," said Stanley. While Kyle had sat primly next to Butters, resting the Roger Groult on the table and crossing his hands in his lap, Stanley could not imagine feeling restive enough to settle in. Gary was trapped between Bradley and Butters, who prattling on about drag.

"I guess I'll miss it," he was saying, even as Stanley noticed his hand creeping toward the bottle of Calvados. Cigarette smoke wafted over from the booth behind them. "It was fun, Brad, wasn't it?"

"You were so good at it"—Stanley could not help but note that this wasn't an answer, exactly.

"But at some point you stop having fun. You have to be an adult and think of that eventually. I don't want to starve myself to fit into little outfits for the rest of my life, you know? I'd like to be home at nights, so we could get a dog."

"That's so interesting," said Gary, "because here I was always taught that being an adult was about getting married, and buying a house, and having children, and all the things you do in the church to cement those things. You're probably not familiar with—being sealed in the temple?"

"Of course I attend church," Butters went on. "Sunday would be incomplete without it."

"Wow," said Gary. "That's so interesting! Because—you can do both things?"

It was pretty obvious to Stanley what he meant.

"And are you a Catholic like Stan?"

"Church of England, lifelong," said Butters. "I was baptized in the font at Durham Cathedral! That was the proudest day of my mother's life."

Gary's features softened. "What an incredibly lovely sentiment."

"Of course, but it's also very wistful," said Bradley, from the other side.

"Yes, she'd probably drop dead, seeing me like this. If my father didn't murder me first, he'd finish me off after _that_. The irony that this is in fact my final go might be lost in the shuffle."

"Maybe this isn't the right place to discuss it," said Gary, "but maybe we have some things to talk about? I wrote to my mother, and I have not heard back from her yet—of course, it may just be the distance, maybe my letter hasn't gotten there yet, but I worry, very much so, and—well, now I'm going to worry that I'm ruining your big night."

Fingers closing around the bottle of calvados, Butters leaned back and said, "It must be awful for you to be over here so alone. I think—Brad, dearie, you'll have to forgive me for being bold, but—do you need a job? It wouldn't pay all _that_ splendidly, but we're about to open a bookshop, and we'll need help deciding how to outfit the place, I mean, we really do need help. We're so lost we can't even decide whether it makes sense to put in a bench. Mostly I trade in antiquarian books, but, I could order you a copy of _A Single Man_ , if you wanted to read it—of course, there I go, Brad, bestowing gifts before sales."

"Oh, Leo, that's a wonderful idea!"

Or a horrible idea, Stanley thought. Suddenly he wished he hadn't surrendered the calvados to Kyle so willingly. He could still taste its sweet, autumnal simplicity, but the memory was no longer a good one.

Had it ever been a good one?

"...after I offered it to Stanley, and he turned it down," Butters was saying.

"Oh, you did?" Gary asked. "But Stan, you love books! What for?"

Kyle piped up: "Because that would spoil his master plan to utterly fritter away his entire life."

"This again? I have written two books, Kyle."

"Why don't you write another book?"

"I don't have an idea for a book right now."

"Can't you do something else, then? That boy is not a career!"

"What does that even mean?" Stanley exclaimed, though of course he knew precisely what Kyle meant by it.

From across the table, Eric was leaning in, leering. At Stanley's side, Kyle's expression had become nearly unreadable in the hot dark. The corners of Gary's mouth had turned down with concern. Bradley's hand was lingering on Butters' shoulder.

And Butters: "Well, I think what he means is, it can be very productive to have something to do outside of the house? That's why he asked me to offer you a job. He thought you might like it!"

A person met all kinds in the netherworld of London vice, but most of those were on holiday, slumming in the deep before surfacing again in the morning. Stanley recalled his first meeting with Gary, and how easily he'd edited out the secondary players who didn't add much to that story: the other missionary, whose name Stanley could not remember, and the trick who'd hidden upstairs in bed, whose name Stanley hadn't asked, and who appeared only briefly to cower, berate, and flee. They lived in the known world, those men, had connections to professions and churches, taking shelter in their clansmen. Stanley had no doubt that those men were loved by many, and perhaps even needed by some; but what was notable about a conventional person who did conventional things, whose mark on others was derived not by trait or characteristic but by the artificial bonds of a society that cast aside anyone with ill-fitted receptors?

When Kyle had left behind his opportunity to do an MPhil to go into London and sell cans of Heinz soup, Stanley had followed. If he thought of this at all he thought of what Kyle had left behind, lamenting the bourgeois straight-adjacent capitalism of his need to own velvet sofas to be fucked against, and cedar armoires into which he could stuff his silk scarves.

But it was only now, in this insufferable and badly kept pub, that Stanley thought of the carrot his old tutor had dangled over his own head: If Stanley one day wished to tell the story of how he and Gary had met—if he were to make a memoir of it—would he preserve the actual fact of what had transpired, with its bit players and superfluous interactions? Or would he tell the truth of the matter, which was that he had met Gary and they were fine friends now, and no one else might have been there at all?

"You should have pursued Blake," said Stanley, proud that he managed somehow to deliver it without a trace of any feeling, as dry as he'd been taught.

"Who's Blake?" asked Gary.

"Some poof," said Eric.

"A _visionary_ ," said Kyle, stiffening. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"You've no right to tell me what to do, to go so far as to conspire with Butters of all people to force me into a life I don't want."

"But you don't know what you want!"

"I refuse to tolerate this."

"But look at what you're doing! Bringing strange men into your home, taking money from your father, refusing to be reasonable—watching it is maddening! This boy could be a whore, some kind of criminal! How do you know he's not the police? You'd never heard of a Mormon before, and neither had I—how do you know he didn't make it up?"

"What I do is none of your business, Kyle."

"Bollocks!" Kyle cried, in such a way that Stanley was not entirely certain if he was being intentionally ironic, or not. "Bullshit, Stanley, you are so full of it it's practically coming out of your eyeballs."

"More of this," said Eric, to Gary specifically. "It gets boring after a while."

"Erica, dear, I really hate to bore you. I'll head home now. No one's obligated to follow. Miss B, you'll forgive me for leaving early—a fine end to a storied career, I think."

Stanley was just at the door when he heard someone shout behind him, "Stan, wait!"

"Ignore him," Stanley instructed, as they marched down Dean Street. "He's jealous, that's all."

They did not speak at all on the walk back to Stanley's flat.

* * *

Immediately on closing the door, Stanley rushed to the cupboard over his sink. He had a few bottles in there: a decent whisky; pedestrian Sapphire gin; brandy to sip with Kyle; grappa, for some reason, alongside the jenever. It was unopened, and he wondered what had possessed him to purchase it. Regardless, this was surely not the occasion to try it. He plucked the whisky from the shelf and shut the cabinet; he uncorked it and took a sip straight from the bottle. What did it matter if he used a glass? It was his house, his whisky, his jars to drink from or not.

Taking Gary to that show—Christ, what a bad idea.

"You okay there, buddy?" Gary asked.

Stanley wiped his mouth, and plunged the cork back into the neck. "I can't deal with him sometimes." He held the bottle up to the overhead light, seeing that it was about half-full. If Kyle didn't make him want to make a trip to the off-license.

"Yeah?" Gary asked. He leaned against the kitchen window, his elbows and ass against it, kicking one leg over the other.

British men don't stand like that, Stanley thought. Something about realizing that was alarming, and so he drank more whisky.

"I have a question to ask you, but I worry it might be too forward."

"How so?" Stanley asked. He finally felt like he'd released whatever tension he'd been feeling, and so he replaced the bottle in its spot in his cupboard. "I rather think I've been something of an open book. You really needn't fear asking me anything, unless it's to find faith, but that's the very forward proposition we started out on, and I don't truly see that happening."

"I can't ask you to find faith," said Gary, and he did sound rather sad about it. "Forcing yourself to believe something for the sake of another person doesn't work. I get that. I can see that."

"Thank you."

"But here's what I want to ask you. Maybe it's not my place to ask but I feel crazy right now and my curiosity feels like it's killing me—I know you said Kyle isn't your boyfriend, but, do you love him? Is it a romance? When you go meet him at that pub, is it—do you guys, ugh." He took a deep breath. " _Do_ you?"

Well, Stanley thought, here we are. What a question. "It isn't romantic," he said, "or at the very least, it isn't sexual. At the moment."

"At the moment?" Gary seemed bereft. "What does that even _mean_?"

"It means we've slept together in the past, but not recently."

"How recently is 'recently'? On the order of months, or years?"

"A few months. Or a few years. I haven't kept track."

"Oh, heck, Stan, of course you did!"

"I haven't, though. You must believe me."

"What is this?" Gary asked. "He likes you, you like him. You're attracted to each other, so what's keeping you fellas? You both know the other one's into it."

"Well," said Stanley. "I'm not sure we do know that."

"You said he was jealous!"

"Because you're younger, and not quite affected. He'd like to be you, I suppose. That's his hold up. It's not about wanting me so much. He knows he could have me, if he wanted that. I think, maybe." Stanley grew quiet. "He doesn't want me."

"Oh, he doesn't, does he? Why do you think he doesn't? No, don't you try to explain it. You're so darn frustrating, Stan—you're so blind—you can't even see what's right in front of you!"

Stanley swallowed. "Such as?"

"I'm going to hell," Gary said. "I'm going to hell for this, aren't I?" He bent forward, keeping his arms to himself, and pressed his lips to Stanley's, just briefly.

A dry kiss, lasting no more than a split second—but Stanley's eyes fell together and he breathed once against Gary's face.

"You're not going to hell for that." Stanley's eyes opened, just to see Gary drawing away. "There is no hell. Hell is just a thing people made up to control the rabble."

"That's right." Gary's cheeks turned red; he bit his lip. He shook his head. "Mormons, we—if it's not salvation, it's darkness. You just disappear—poof." He opened his fists, spread his fingers. "I'm already in hell, wanting this. What's the difference? I don't want to be in spiritual agony anymore. I can't make this go away. I've tried, and I can't, and it's—I'm suffering, Stan, honestly. But you don't think I deserve to suffer."

"No." Stanley licked his lips, conscious now that they were dry—chapped, even. His hand fell, lightly, on Gary's bent knee. "It's not god making you suffer, you know, it's other people. And why should that mean we just disappear? That's what they want, isn't it?"

"I guess," Gary agreed.

"I think if you get to know Kyle, you'll come to admire him, even if you can't like him. He is someone who refuses to disappear. I used to be—when I met him, I was more like you, I ... I didn't think I could have what I wanted. I didn't want to suffer in silence, I just assumed I had to. And Kyle, he—you know, he showed me that wasn't true."

"I guess that makes sense." Gary's expression, which had been tight, softened somewhat—Stanley noticed that his eyes were wet at the waterlines, just a touch, a mere glisten. "But I don't want to talk about him right now."

"What do you want to talk about?"

"Nothing," Gary said. "I don't want to talk about anything at all."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. I want to kiss some more."

"We can do that, if you want," Stanley agreed.

"And if that goes okay—if I get a little courage—we could..." He trailed off, looking down. Stanley took his hand away from Gary's knee, and Gary looked up again. Their eyes locked. "You could show me, um. How two guys—"

Stanley swallowed. "I could show you that, if you wanted me to."

"Maybe I would. But, could we just kiss first? See where it goes?"

* * *

Stanley woke up too early; the clock near the bed said it wasn't even 9 yet, which was unusual for him. He was sober and clear-headed. The light spilling into his flat and onto the loft was causing him no pain whatsoever. He was clean. He was rested.

There was a boy in his bed.

The boy was stirring. "Morning," said Gary. He propped himself up on his arm. "Sleep okay?"

"Never better," said Stanley. It came, just reflexively, but in fact, it was also true. "How are you?"

"Sore." Stanley was about to apologize, but Gary added: "And really happy."

"It's a relief to hear that," Stanley confessed.

"It's a relief to say it! That's—so, that's making love to a man?"

"That's making love to a man."

"And this is waking up with one."

"Well, some version of it. What do you think?"

"I think it's heaven." Gary's eyes lit up. He blinked, and Stan noticed he was a bit wet at the corners. "It makes you wonder—why would you wait until you die to have something as good as this?"

"Because what most people want isn't a struggle," said Stanley. "They see you struggling and they can't imagine you could be happy like that."

"There's salvation in struggle. Like, Jacob with the angel. Or the Jews in the desert. Or Jesus and temptation. Or Joseph Smith and—"

Stanley stopped Gary with a finger to his lips. "Don't make it about that," he said, quietly.

"Then what is it about?"

Stanley thought for a moment. "Two people. Human nature. Shared pain. I mean, having the same pain. Wanting to soothe it in the same way."

"You're such a poet," said Gary.

"I'm a novelist," Stan corrected.

"And I'm horny again. You gonna kiss me, Stan, or do I have to get more obvious?"

Stanley kissed him, deeply, and thought to himself: _You should be grateful to be so obvious_. To kiss each other at all, in the daylight (if indoors); to slide one's hands lower, slowly, down sinewy thighs; to breathe in against a thick neck and feel the prick of short hairs growing back against the bridge of one's nose; to press one's lips against a shoulder and draw so thickly that it left a mark: Stanley was grateful.

This was a turning point. Stanley had an American in his bed, and they were making love at 9 in the morning and there was nothing forgettable about it. This was no set path; there was no map to give guidance to the nearest rest area. There was just Gary, and Stanley, and that was it, and that was everything. They would get up later, fix some breakfast, go down the pub and hold hands. To have a boyfriend. To not have to lie about it! To let love breathe in the air and be fed with notice and appreciation—maybe it wouldn't rot, and maybe it wouldn't harden.

This could be a third book, Stanley thought, rubbing sweat into Gary's skin. Could I ever write a happy ending? he wondered, as he swallowed Gary's spit. Stanley was unable to answer with certainty; even as he buried his hands in the cleft of Gary's behind, Stanley knew that in some way, he was bringing new uncertainty into his own life. He had only just managed to account for himself, and there was now, unexpectedly, a second person.

"Stan!" Gary grasped at Stanley's jaw, pulling their mouths together. Against wet lips: "I gotta—how do you—I can't—"

"Darling, of course you can."

And Gary did.

And when he'd come down somewhat, and his face was flushed and glistening, he put his hands against Stanley's chest and said, "Thank you."

No one had ever thanked Stanley for sex before; or if they had, he couldn't remember. In that moment, he knew: this thing, it wouldn't harden.

Maybe, Stanley thought, it would blossom.

* * *

Now that we are at the end: thank you so much for reading! Feedback, including criticism, is always welcome. And, honestly, I've been much more active on AO3 as SekritOMG and under the name "familiar," where I've posted some fic for the webcomic _Check, Please!_ I've also established a DW account under "sekritomg" and continue to half-heartedly monitor my SP Tumblr skrtomg. Any one of those places is more ideal for keeping up with my projects, including the RIAT conclusion, whenever that posts. FFN has served me well over the years - but, jeez, this site is just not functional compared to other platforms.

But, I don't want to end on a negative note - thank you again for sticking with this very long, very weird story!


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